THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

The next few paragraphs are probably going to piss off most of my readers to the point of spastically shouting “F*ck this stupid f*cking idiot and his f*ckity-f*ck-f*cking website” repeatedly till their heads explode but here goes. I’m not a fan of Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT. Never have been. I’ve seen it many times and have always found it to be vastly inferior to BATMAN BEGINS.

Here’s my issues: TDK is incredibly overrated (Quick list of superhero movies superior to TDK: the original SUPERMAN, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, THE CROW, IRON MAN, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN), full of unanswered questions (What happened to The Narrows, Arkham Asylum, and the Gotham monorail system featured so prominently in BB?), ripe with visual inconsistencies (Nolan dropping the comic book tone and style of BB in favor of a dour riff on Michael Mann’s HEAT is something that will never cease to annoy me), packed with plot holes (How did Harvey escape the hospital so fast? Where did his Joker and his gang disappear to after he tossed Rachel out the window? Why did Batman take the blame for Harvey’s crime spree when he could’ve easily pinned it on The Joker?), poorly paced (any fanboy who griped about Sam Raimi shoehorning Venom into the last twenty of SPIDER-MAN 3 needs to remember Nolan pulled the exact same stunt with Two-Face), and loaded with unnecessary detours (the subplots involving the guy trying to blackmail Bruce Wayne, the trip to Hong Kong, and Joker’s bizarre plan with the two ferries could’ve easily been trimmed down or eliminated entirely).

The only thing saving TDK from being a total wash is Heath Ledger’s virtuoso performance as The Joker. That’s it. Everyone else in the cast, save for maybe Aaron Eckhart, is clearly just rehashing their performances from BB. There’s no sense of progression, no growth, no development. That just won’t do when you’ve got Ledger (R.I.P) delivering the performance of a lifetime.

Had Ledger just phoned it in or flat-out sucked, fanboys would’ve not accepted such standard issue performances. They would’ve paid for their single ticket (they certainly wouldn’t have kept coming back and propelled TDK to the box office glory it achieved) and simply dismissed TDK as yet another subpar superhero sequel to be thrown in with the likes of FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER, SUPERMAN III, and BATMAN AND ROBIN.

Click on the pic to check out my review of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES…