They don’t make superhero franchises much darker than this

New York Magazine Says: “The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic…”

Here are some quotes from the review:

“…the novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic. Even its most wondrous vision—Batman’s plunges from skyscrapers, bat-wings snapping open as he glides through the night like a human kite—can’t keep the movie airborne. There’s an anvil attached to that cape.

“On paper, the morality play is intriguing, but a lot of the dialogue should have stayed on paper (I can imagine a study guide: “The Joker tells Batman he can’t fight chaos because he has too many ‘rules.’ Do those rules ultimately help or hinder Batman in his quest for justice?”). Nolan is grappling with the Big Themes of vigilantism (especially urban vigilantism…. But the psychological twists in The Dark Knight—especially the transformation of Dent into “Two-Face”—are baffling as drama. They play as if they’d been penned by Oxford philosophy majors trying to tone up a piece of American pop—to turn it into an uncivil Shavian dialogue, Don Juan in Hell with mutilations and truck crashes.

“Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f— just happened?”…

“The Dark Knight is all fits and starts—fitfully suspenseful, fitfully scary, one jerky episode after another with jolts of brutality to keep you revved up. When Burton’s Batman came out, some prominent critics griped that the film was too violent for kids. Wait’ll they get a load of this…

“How is Heath Ledger? My heart went out to him. He’s working so very hard to fill the void, to be doing something every second. It’s rave and rage and purge acting…. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but in truth, I found the performance painful to watch. Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself—trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one.”

(source)