Now that the initial hype and queues are over I thought I'd take my two youngest boys to the movie of the moment. I like the 12A rating because it suggests no one younger than twelve but leaves it up to the adult if a child is under that age. My boys are 15 and 8 and I was comfortable taking them both.
It's a great movie if a little over-long and Heath Ledger's Joker really does deserve all the praise. His amateurish looking make-up gives him a much more manic look than the old style clown with green hair get up. And this time Gotham looks even more like something from film noir than it did in the previous movie. It's a magnificent mix of Blade Runner style visuals and Chandler'ish characters as the Dark Knight walks, swings and glides down these mean streets.
This film is a million miles away from any other super-hero film and is a serious crime thriller that just happens to feature a guy in a bat suit. The performances are uniformly excellent. The obligatory effect heavy action scenes are all here but thankfully there is much character development and a real plot to go along with it.
Don't expect Superman or Spidey type heroics from Batman who has always been that much closer to the real world.
The only complaint I have is that the film would have been better sans half and hour. The oriental scene, for instance, could have been chopped from the film with nothing lost and everything gained.
Still a stunning movie and together with the awkwardly titled Batman Begins is the definitive Batman movie. And a brilliant movie in its own right and it is very much film noir. It has all the ingredients - guilt, violence, madness, corruption and a complex morally ambiguous main protagonist.
A beautiful beast of a film that deserves to be taken seriously. It's a summer blockbuster with independent yearnings.
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