“THE DARK KNIGHT” (2008)

Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Monique Curnen, Ron Dean, Cillian Murphy, Chin Han, Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Ritchie Coster & Anthony Michael Hall
Written by Jonathan Nolan (screenplay), Christopher Nolan (screenplay/story), David S. Goyer (story) & Bob Kane (characters)
Directed by Christopher Nolan

Polly Staffle Rating: *

“Some media is the whack. You believe it’s true? It blows me through the roof. Suckers, liars, get me a shovel. Some writers I know are damn devils. For them, I say don’t believe the hype.” - Public Enemy

In the final frames of “The Dark Knight,” the title of the film is referenced and suddenly the screen goes black before the credits kick in. That moment of darkness defines this entire film for me. “The Dark Knight” is an ugly movie. It is a nasty and mean super hero film, based too close to reality at times and too much like a horror film at other times.

“Why so serious?” is the question The Joker was supposedly asked as a child before his father turned his frown upside down with a knife. That question is also what I would pose to director Christopher Nolan. This is a fricking movie about a guy that dresses up like a bat having it out with a guy in makeup for god’s sake and you’ve turned it into an endurance test of misery.

Now before I get too deep into this review, I have a confession that I recently realized about myself. I do not like Batman. I’ve never liked any of the movies and I think the character is too serious and boring. Hellboy, Tank Girl, and Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello aka the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: those are my kind of super heros. They’re wise-cracking, fun-loving bad asses.

Batman? He’s a rich dweeb with gadgets. He’s not the “Mr. GQ smooth now” James Bond is, nor is he as slick. No, I’m not talking about the recent reincarnations of James Bond either. I’m talking about old school 007 played by Roger Moore in “Live and Let Die” (1973), “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974), “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), “Moonraker” (1979), “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), “ Octopussy” (1983) and “A View to a Kill” (1985). With Moore in the role, James Bond was a “Rico Suave” pimp daddy to the max. More than just a detective with gizmos on his side, he was a playboy that didn’t take himself too serious. Most of all he was exciting.

There’s nothing exciting about Batman, especially the way Christian Bale plays him. And I am a fan of Bale’s. In the right roles (“The Machinist,” “The Prestige,” “American Psycho,” “Equilibrium,” “Harsh Times”) he is amazing. Here as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Bale’s a pouty guy doing a bad Clint Eastwood impression. The ladies man quality George Clooney brought to the role? Not here.

But it’s not just Bale or the character of Batman, this whole movie is god awful, not to mention depressing. I can’t think of a single good quality to it. The editing was bad and the action scenes were too dark, giving me flashbacks to Rob Zombie’s “Halloween,” which was rated R by the way, another thing “The Dark Knight” should have had in common with it. There’s too many characters spitting nonsense and talking their way out of plotlines. There are too many plotlines that often times don’t make a lot of sense. But most importantly, after all the pain and suffering you endure watching the damn thing, there’s absolutely no ending.

The plot can be summed up like this: A guy with too much money and time on his hands is having a midlife crisis and dealing with unwanted drama. That’s what the film is about. You see, dressing up in a bat costume and creepy crawling around town to kick the asses of evil doers just isn’t doing it for Bruce Wayne any more. His Batman character is getting stale. It’s not the new flavor anymore and he has his haters. It seems everyone is hip to the fact his ways are a bit questionable and at the same time copy cats have started to wreck havoc.

Then a crazy homicidal maniac that wears makeup shows up. The Joker (Heath Ledger) is an anarchist that says dopey things like, “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.” The Joker likes to play games, but there is nothing fun about him; think Jigsaw of the “Saw” franchise. Unlike Jigsaw, however, there is no rhyme or reason to what The Joker does. He kills, steals, burns things, blows things up ... oh, just because.

Then there is assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), thrown in for a love triangle between Bruce Wayne and coin-flipping D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is a poser Dudley Do-Right that can 360 on you in the blink of an eye. To top it off and to muddle things up, there’s Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman essentially playing actor Tom Skerritt of “Picket Fences”), who’s also up to shady antics in the name of justice, and computer/science wizard Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman with his usual wise old man shtick) and butler Alfred (a highly underused Michael Caine) alternating between standing around, doing nothing and wiping Bruce Wayne’s ass as the only voices of reason in the whole mess.

The Joker declares, “This city deserves a better class of criminal.” Sadly, the same can be said for its lawmen. There’s no good or bad, right or wrong, moral or corrupt in “The Dark Knight.” There’s no revenge or justice either. All that stands is a chaotic war zone. They always say “all’s fair in love and war,” but the truth is nothing is fair in war. There are only sides. Imaginary sides. Batman is on the “win-at-all-cost” side and The Joker is on the “what makes you so righteous, you hypocritical buffoon” side. Both are law breakers. Both are doing what they feel is right in their own perverted ways. Both mostly only kill criminals. Both are misfits by choice. Batman can hang up his Halloween costume and never look back, while The Joker can wipe that crap off his face and get plastic surgery if the scars bother him that much. They do what they do out of choice unlike the characters of Hellboy and the Ninja Turtles, who as green reptiles and a red demon are outcasts from society because of looks and characteristics they can not change.

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” says Dent at one point in the film. What he is essentially saying is when all that divides two sides in combat are imaginary borders placed there by the leaders; the masses will flip back and fourth. Whichever side is most convenient at the time will be the side they take. Like the supporters of the Vietnam war that soon became protestors. Like the supporters of George W. Bush and his war on terror that now call for his head. In simpler terms, one man’s hero is another man’s terrorist. Or from a slightly different angle, as Marilyn Manson sang on “The Dope Show: “They love you when you’re on all the covers. When you’re not, they love another.” But instead of “The Dark Knight” making a statement about the government, the invasion of privacy in the name of truth, authorities that go above the law that they are supposedly upholding, America’s egotistical and self-serving ways or how finicky the masses are, it rings more as an endorsement for all these things.

Themes and plot aside, Batman is drained of all of his fun here. The coolest thing we get is the Batbike. The Batmobile? Not here. Batman drives around in a tank. The Bat Cave? A no show. Batman’s bunker is beneath a shipping yard. The spooky Tim Burton vision of Gotham City? Gone. The film was shot in Chicago and was not dressed up at all, so Gotham looks like any other big city. Burton’s Gotham transports you to a different universe. Christopher Nolan might as well of got rid of the whole Gotham City name and had his film take place in Los Angeles or New York. Or even better, he could have had the thing took place in west Texas and called it “No Country for Old Batman.”

Nolan takes away the fantasy elements that I have mentioned and tries filling in those gaps with realism. But though he wants his film to seem as though it could possibly happen, he isn’t consistent. Near the beginning of the film, Batman bends the barrel of a gun. How? He has no super human strength. At one point, Batman jumps out of a window many, many stories up, catches Rachel Dawes and then they both slam onto the top of a car. He and she both survive this, how? Again, he isn’t Hellboy who can take such a fall. Also, did I mention Batman can now fly? Yep. He’s a regular old “Condorman” without the cool car. This moneybags, who in real life would be the equivalent of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban or the Sacramento Kings-owning Maloof brothers, can soar through the air, yet this technology has not been made available to our military?

Which brings me to the biggie: The United States government, the military, etc. are nowhere to be found in this film. Like I said, this isn’t a comic book alternate universe Gotham City, it’s not even the “Batman Begins” Gotham with a monorail train. It’s Gotham City, Illinois and a guy dressed as a bat is causing near riots as the masses look to burn him at the stake, while a faceless coward is blowing things up. Shouldn’t the President of the United States sort of, like, look into this and stuff?

Lastly, much ado has been made about the performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker. Surely, I was blown away by that, right? Truthfully, I don’t get the hype. During the screening I saw, many in the audience laughed every time The Joker was on screen. I was simply creeped out much like when I see Aaliyah as the mother of all vampires in “Queen of the Damned,” but more so knowing Ledger’s lip-smaking, out-of-his-mind performance probably isn’t an act. (On top of that, Ledger was a decent looking guy that was a mediocre actor at best. Dying of a drug overdose is always tragic, but just because an actor passes that way doesn’t make him great. River Phoenix he wasn’t. For that matter, Ledger wasn’t even in Brad Renfro’s league.) Ledger’s purple-suit wearing clown mostly comes off as a caricature of Jack Nicholson as The Joker in “Batman,” borrowing Brandon Lee’s “nothing to lose” attitude in “The Crow.” Neither of them won Academy Awards, so Leger’s mimicking surely doesn’t even deserve a nomination.

And speaking of “The Crow,” that’s a film that is dark, nasty and violent like “The Dark Knight.” It is based off a graphic novel, its villain is a psychopathic anarchist, and the film also features the last performance of its makeup wearing star. I love “The Crow.” It’s easily one of my top 50 favorite films of all time. I hate “The Dark Knight.” What’s the difference? At its core, “The Dark Knight” is about pain, suffering and malevolence. Watching it felt like Nolan dunked my head into an overflowing murky cesspool for two and a half hours. When it was over, I was gasping for air, running for the exit, pissed off I hadn’t seen the disappointing, but still good “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” for a second time instead.

“The Crow,” on the other hand, is a love story. It’s about the power love gives humans and the rage that consumes us when we lose it. It’s also about justice and using that rage instead of letting it destroy us. These are lessons The Batman, The Joker and Havery Dent could learn from Eric Draven. In “The Crow,” the wrongs are set right. Good prevails, triumphing even death. Its ending gives us hope. It inspires and assures us that even in darkness there is light. Maybe I am in the minority, but that’s how I like my super hero films to end.

- CCF, August 2008

I WUPPED BATMAN’S ASS

“I Wupped Batman’s Ass”
Lyrics by Wesley Willis

Batman got on my nerves
He was running me amok
He ridiculed me, calling me a bum

I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass

Batman thought he was bad
He was a fucking asshole in the first place
He got knocked to the floor

I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass

Batman beat the hell out of me and knocked me to the floor
I got back up and knocked him to the floor
He was being such a jackoff

I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass
I wupped Batman’s ass