“We burned the forest down.”

Do you want to know how I got these scars into writing about movies?

My college had its own version of “The Onion” where I made my bones writing utterly run-of-the-mill edgy early 2000’s college humour (i.e. the kind of stuff that would get me cancelled today so fast it would break the laws of physics) and my editor asked me if I’d be interested in trying my hand at writing a movie review. And the very first movie I ever reviewed for them (if memory serves) was none other than The Dark Knight. And now you know my gritty origin story. And, if you are old enough to remember my earliest reviews (DON’T GO BACK AND READ THEM DON’T YOU DO IT I SWEAR TO GOD) you’ll remember that this movie was a BIG deal to me and those early reviews are chock full of references to it, even when they weren’t relevant or funny. Which was all the time. I see that now.

So, as you can imagine, I approached this one with a great deal of trepidation. Is it really as good as I remember?

No, actually.

In fact, in many ways, it’s better.

Now, it’s not perfect, by any means. But I was worried that this movie had aged. But, when compared to pretty much the entire superhero genre at the time of writing, TDK has aged like fine wine. For starters, this feels like, y’know, a movie. Not a piece of content. Not an advertisement for a streaming service. This is an actual proper dramatic film with , y’know, good writing. Excellent cinematography. Acting. Editing. Score. Tone. Themes. Aesthetics. WEIGHT. It feels weighty.

There are certainly criticisms you can level at it, as many have since its release. As with any popular piece of work that doesn’t make its political position blatantly clear, people have a tendency to project their own narratives onto it. I definitely think that it caught a lot of flak when, a mere seven years after 9/11, it asked the question:

“Are extraordinary measures ever justified when a democracy is threatened by extraordinary threats?”

and proceeded to give an answer more nuanced than…

That said, I think the critiques of the movie as pro-Neocon or even fascist are overblown in the extreme. Batman may beat the Joker in an interrogation room and, in doing so, loses everything.

It’s only by trusting in the inherent decency of ordinary people that Batman is able, finally, to defeat the clown.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

The movie announces itself with one of the best opening sequences in 21st century American cinema.

When we first see Ledger’s Joker he’s waiting by the side of the road, perfectly, utterly still. Not simply standing but almost…offline. Like a character in a joke, he doesn’t even exist until the joke is told. He gets picked up in a car by two other hoods wearing clown masks and they head off to the bank. Watching it again and knowing the twist makes the scene even better and even more darkly funny. I could gush all day about all the wonderful little details, like how the Joker is wearing a mask based on one used in an episode from, of all things, the sixties show. What we see in this sequence is the World According to Joker. No one can be trusted. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is a lie and everyone is being lied to, including us, the audience. As the clown robbers kill each other one after the other the bank manager (William Fichtner) comes out of his office blasting a shot gun because it turns out this is an eeeevil bank run by criminals.

Whatever joke you thought of, just imagine it here, this is going to be a long review and I don’t have time to go for the low hanging fruit.

Anyway, the bank manager sees the last clown murder his two comrades and laments that criminals used to have respect and a code of honour.

He yells at Joker, asking him what he believes in and Joker responds with the famous line “I believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you…stranger.”

Also, and I can’t believe I didn’t realise this before, but I always thought Joker then kills the bank manager. But instead, he puts a grenade in his mouth and pulls the pin as he drives off, only for the grenade to give off harmless smoke. One last joke.

Okay, so it’s been around a year since Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham and things are actually starting to look up for America’s Shittiest City. There’s a new District Attorney named Harvey Dent who has actually been making headway against the city’s criminals, the Batman is now an established and feared presence in the underworld and Jim Gordon has been put in charge of the Major Crimes Unit or MCU, (yes, yes, it’s very funny, settle down, settle down).

In fact, it’s become rather tough being a criminal in Gotham, which is why mobsters like The Chechen (Ritchie Coster) have to resort to freaks like The Scarecrow to source their drugs. This is something I love about this film; it’s a period piece. What I mean is, it’s a movie that chronicles a very specific moment in Gotham’s fictional history, where the old mobsters (awful but nonetheless with a certain code of conduct) gave way to the “Better Class of Criminal”, the deranged super-freaks that came to dominate its underworld. And it’s not just the villains who are getting crazier. The Chechen’s drug deal gets interrupted by three concerned citizens wearing Batman costumes and wielding shotguns. This little potential bloodbath gets broken up by the real Batman who arrests both the Scarecrow and the vigilantes, one of whom quite reasonably asks why his kind of vigilantism is okay and there’s isn’t. To which Batman growls “I’m not wearing hockey pants.”

Alright, let’s tackly the gravelly voiced elephant in the room.

Yes, the voice is dumb. Distractingly so. “Actively-makes-the-movie-worse” dumb. Which is galling for two reasons. Firstly, because Bale pretty much nailed the voice in Batman Begins and secondly because his Bruce Wayne is absolutely fantastic, really nailing the character’s asshole playboy persona.

At another ransacked bank, Gordon’s starting to get a little concerned about this clown fellow but Batman insists that he’s not the priority because he’s just one man (maybe he’s a symbol, Bruce?). Batman and Gordon have spent the last year planting irradiated dollar bills into the mob’s hands to allow them to identify the banks that the gangsters are using to launder their money. I don’t have proof that this is a reference to the irradiated dollar bills from the forties Batman and Robin but it’s the internet and I’m just going to say it and you’ll have to believe me. They now know the banks and Batman wants to strike. But Gordon says this job is too big for just the MCU and that means they’ll have to bring in the DA. Batman has concerns.

Of course, his suspicions of the new DA may not be entirely unbiased as Harvey is putting a Dent in Bruce’s chances of ever getting into Rachel Dawses’ pants again as they’re in luuuurve.

Harvey is currently prosecuting Sal Maroni who he suspects of running the Gotham Mob (given that he’s played by Eric Roberts, he is of course correct). Dent’s case collapses when his star witness turns hostile and pulls a gun on him in the courtroom so he agrees to meet with Gordon.

Gordon and Dent initially have a strained relationship as Dent investigated most of the MCU for corruption but, as Gordon points out, police corruption in Gotham is less a binary and more a beautiful, diverse spectrum.

Unofrtunately, the bust is a…bust. All the gangsters in Gotham are summoned to a meeting by their accountant, a Mr. Lau, who informs them that the police were going to take all their money but, fortunately for them, he was able to stash it somewhere secret while he am-scrays to Hong Kong where he can’t be extradited. Then we hear…laughter. Sort of.

Okay, so in my last review in this series I put out my stall that Scarecrow actually makes a more logical arch-nemesis for Batman than the Joker. And I do think that makes sense on paper…but…having thought about it some more I don’t think it works in practice. The reason why Joker works better as Batman’s arch-nemesis than any other character is that he’s the only one of the rogues who is as versatile and plastic as Batman himself. The sixties Batman never used Two-Face or Scarecrow because those characters were too dark. The Dark Knight series never used The Riddler or Kite-Man because they were too silly. But the Joker is one of the very, very few bat villains who can always adapt to the tone of the Batman story he’s in.

Heath Ledger’s Joker, apart from being just…a fucking phenomenal performance, demonstrates exactly why this character is such a gift for any actor and why there are honestly very few bad Joker performances (look, I’ll just come out and say it, Suicide Squad is a terrible movie, and Jared Leto is a pretty awful person, but he was a really good Joker). At the time the movie was being made, Nicholson’s Joker was haunting the role (just like Ledger’s haunts it now) and Ledger wanted above all else to create a character who wasn’t just a pale imitation of Jack Napier.

He did that, obviously. But what I think is even more impressive is that this Joker diverges real hard from the comics and still feels perfect. Let’s be clear, this is not a comics’ accurate Joker and the movie wastes no time telling you that.

GAMBOL: You’re crazy.

JOKER: I’m not. No. I’m not.

I mean…case closed. The comics Joker revels in his insanity, luxuriates in it. Ledger also shows why you have to master the rules before you can break them. Everything about his performance, the muttered delivery, the hunched posture, that would all kill any impact if employed by a less confident actor. He reminds me a lot of Tom Hardy, funnily enough, another actor who can be more arresting with a muttered grunt than a shouted monologue. You just…can’t…look…away…he is so fucking good.

Anyway, the Joker offers to kill the Batman in exchange for half of all their money which the mobsters naturally refuse, with one of them, Gambol, instead putting a hit on the Joker.

With Lau in the wind Dent and Gordon turn to Batman to get him back from Hong Kong. Funnily enough, this entire subplot was what convinced Warner Brothers to not even bother trying to get the movie past the Chinese censors which resulted in it becoming one of the most bootlegged movies in China’s history. Lau gets deposited on Gordon’s doorstep. Dent and Rachel offer Lau a deal; full immunity and he gets to keep the mob’s money in exchange for the names of all the mobsters he did business with. You know, in previous Batman reviews this would normally be the point where I’d be saying something like “Doctor Tornado and Mistress Nefaria decide to team up to steal the moon”. This feels more like I’m recapping American Gangster or something.

So with Lau in custody the mobsters get desperate and ask the Joker for help, in one stroke invalidating every single episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals.

Shortly after, Hockey Pads Man shows up dead (I suspect his archenemy, The Puck!). Strapped to the body is a joker card and footage of the Joker torturing the hapless vigilante and threatening to kill people until Batman reveals his identity (fun fact, all the Joker hostage videos were directed and shot by Heath Ledger and they are terrifying.) DNA samples found on the card tell Gordon that the Joker is going to target Harvey Dent, the judge trying the mob money case and Commissioner Loeb.

Bruce is so impressed with Harvey that he decides to throw him a fund-raiser.

And he’s doing that because he believes that Harvey Dent can clean up this stinkhole which means he can stop being Batman which means that he can steal Rachel back from under Harvey’s magnificently chiseled chin.

Bruce lays out what he’s doing to Rachel but she’s iffy. Harvey then proposes to Rachel and she’s iffy about that too. Poor Rachel, being fought over by two incredibly handsome wealthy men like a common YA protagonist. The Joker attacks with his goons looking for Harvey Dent. Bruce saves Harvey by stashing him in his saferoom and then changes into the Batsuit and saves Rachel when Joker pushes her out the window.

Later, in the Own Brand Batcave (if your mansion has burnt down, store-bought is fine) Bruce tries to figure out who this clown is and what are his goals, his hopes, his dreams. Alfred tells him a heart-warming story about propping up brutal dictatorships in South-East Asia (no sarcasm, the line “some friends and I were doing some work for the local government” is perfect in its banal euphemism). Alfred tells him about a bandit leader who was robbing shipments of precious jewels for fun and that some people just be cray, yo.

At Wayne Enterprises Lucius Fox is approached by an employee named Coleman Reese who’s uncovered that Bruce Wayne is Batman and tries to blackmail him. Fox calmly replies that he’s welcome to try if he wants to make an enemy of the most dangerous man on Earth but he does look at Reese’s notes and finds a project that he knew nothing about. When he asks Bruce about this, all Bruce says is that he’s playing this one close to the chest and far from the Bill of Rights.

“I’m sure this is fine.”

So at the commissioner’s funeral, a disguised Joker opens fire and seemingly kills Gordon. Dent, starting to break mentally, abducts one of the Joker’s henchmen and tries to psychologically torture him into giving the Joker up. Batman arrives and tells him that he can’t let the Joker bring him down to his level and tells him instead to call a press conference where Batman will reveal his secret identity.

Future historians will refer to 2008 as The Golden Age of Press Conference Superhero Identity Reveals.

Instead, Harvey decides to reveal that he is The Batman. Watching from Bruce’s penthouse, Rachel is disgusted with Bruce letting Harvey take the fall and gives Alfred a note to give to Bruce later.

Harvey gets transported across town to jail but the convey is attacked by the Joker’s goons in a scene that culminates in one of the most spectacular vehicle stunts of the 21st century.

“Watch me do a tumble Ma! OWWW!”

Joker tries to goad Batman into crashing into him but, oh, that one pesky rule. Batman gets knocked unconscious but is saved at the last minute by Jim Gordon!

Honestly, this is a rare bum note in the movie for me. I hate fake out deaths, and the fact that Gordon apparently sent cops to his wife TO TELL HER HE’D DIED just to make it more convincing kinda makes him look like an absolute asshole.

So the Joker’s been captured…

But neither Harvey Dent nor Rachel Dawes made it home safely.

So, all out of options, Gordon decides that only one man can make the Joker talk.

I know a couple who role-played this on their wedding night. Nothing to do with the movie, I just needed to get that out there.

Some of my absolute favourite scenes in all of Batman media are scenes where Batman and the Joker just sit down and…talk. The last scene of Killing Joke. Batman showing the Joker the Riddler’s file in The Batman. For all that this movie’s Joker is not comics accurate, the relationship these two have absolutely is. This potent mixture of repulsion, fascination and recognition. A hatred that, over eighty years, has become so old and passionate that it feels almost like love. Batman stares at the Joker like a horrific car-crash, not understanding why he can’t look away. And the Joker sees…a project? A chance to not be alone? A mirror image that’s just missing one tiny, thing. A smile.

They talk while Gordon watches, confident that Batman is in control. But Gordon’s made a crucial mistake. The Joker has Rachel, which means it’s not Batman in there. It’s Bruce Wayne. And he’s just a man.

Finally, after showing just how powerless all Batman’s threats really are, Joker gives a pity confession and tells him where Harvey and Rachel are being held. Batman races off to save Rachel, while Gordon goes to save Harvey, leaving the Joker in the interrogation room. With a single guard. Who’s also in the room with him.

“Uh…sure you don’t wanna put me in a cell?”

Meanwhile, Rachel and Harvey are being held in seperate warehouses but can communicate by radio. Rachel tells Harvey that if one of them is rescued the other will be blown up so she takes the opportunity to tell Harvey that she will marry him. Unfortunately, the Joker lied, which means Batman actually saves Harvey and Rachel is killed. In the explosion, half of Harvey’s face is burned off and this finally drives him over the edge.

Meanwhile, the Joker has escaped (shock! gasps! questions asked in Parliament!) and Gordon realises that (sing it with me) BEING CAPTURED WAS PART OF HIS PLAN ALL ALONG.

And, I swear to God kids, that was actually a cool twist way back before every other movie ran it into the fucking ground.

With the Joker escaped Gotham goes into full on panic. Coleman Reese decides to reveal Batman’s identity on live TV in the hope that this will stop the Joker’s rampage but Mister J has a change of heart and instead announces that he’ll blow up a hospital unless Reese is killed, forcing Bruce to save his life.

Joker visits Harvey in hospital dressed as a nurse (because, what else would you wear to a birth?) and gives Dent the last little push he needs into full on freakdom. Harvey finally embraces the coin, becomes Two-Face, and swears vengeance on the mob and the corrupt cops who love them.

CGI really peaked in the late aughties, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, two ferries leave Gotham. One carrying civilians fleeing the city’s carnage, and the other carrying prisoners deemed too dangerous to leave in the city during the crisis. Both ferries lose power and the Joker reveals his final game; a version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Each ferry has a detonator that will blow up the other and if neither detonator is activated before midnight both bombs will go off. This, as you can imagine, causes quite the stir.

Batman, desperate to find the Joker, shows Lucius that thing he was working on which turns out to be a way to monitor every cellphone in Gotham.

“Oh shit. It wasn’t fine.”

Lucius agrees to help Batman this one last time, but says that after that, he’s done. And yeah, it’s absolutely a little problematic that the movie shows illegal surveillance as the key to victory against terrorism. On the other hand, how many other movies in this genre would even take the time to acknowledge that this raises serious ethical questions? Like, I’m pretty sure if Iron Man had had a scene where he hacks every cellphone on Earth to find Ironmonger, that would have just been accepted as Iron Man doing regular Iron Man shit.

Anyway Batman tracks the Joker to where he’s holding a group of people hostage and has to battle not only the Joker and his goons but Gordon’s SWAT team because they don’t realise that Joker has disguised the hostages as clowns, the clowns as hostages, and himself as Batman, probably.

As the clock ticks down, both the civilians and the prisoners debate whether to blow the other ship up. One prisoner gets the warden to give up the detonator through sheer menace…and then proceeds to throw it out the window.

And I feel again the need to praise the casting in this movie. They didn’t need to get an actor of Tommy Lister Junior’s calibre to play this part. It’s not even a minute of screentime. Three lines tops. But it’s the fact that every single speaking role is cast with a fantastic actor is what makes this movie so special. Every scene has great acting work, it’s just pure quality from start to finish.

The civilians actually come closer to killing the prisoners, but at the last second no one actually has the stomach for murder.

The Joker, for the first time, is genuinely confused. He just can’t fathom that his worldview might be wrong. Batman stops him from blowing up the ships and leaves him dangling in the air. He tells Joker that he’s lost, but Joker counters that once Gotham sees what’s become of their saviour Harvey Dent, they’ll be well on their way to becoming like him. The Joker then muses that he and Batman will never be able to kill each other and that they’re going to be doing this forever.

What I say every day to my list of review requests, oddly enough.

Batman then has to race to the scene where Two-Face has kidnapped Gordon’s wife, son and daughter and is forcing Gordon to choose which one he shoots.

Look, I know this will sound cold but trust me, I’ve read the comics.
CHOOSE THE BOY.

Batman is forced to kill Harvey save Gordon’s son and, realising that Gotham needs the legend of Harvey Dent, decides to take the blame for all of his crimes. Alfred reads Rachel’s note which would have told Bruce that she was choosing Harvey and could never be with him and decides that Bruce has a had a bad enough day and burns it. Lucius shuts down the surveillance network, only to learn that Bruce rigged it to self-destruct so it could never be used or abused again. And the movie ends with Batman going on the run, hunted by the city that he saved.

***

Still, after all these years, probably the super-hero genre’s zenith. Fucking masterful.

The Dark Knight Detective

Though not perfect. This, regrettably, is where Bale’s Batman slips irrevocably into self parody. It should be a fatal weakness but, given how Batman is largely restricted to action scenes where he speaks very little, the movie survives. And this is still probably the best film Bruce Wayne.

His Faithful Manservant

Michael Caine gets some lovely moments here and it feels like he and Bale really found a groove in their scenes together. They feel a lot more like family this time around.

The Clown Prince of Crime

I mean, I don’t think I’m rocking any boats here. But Heath Ledger is quite good.

To put it another way, when he says that they were destined to do this forever, the fact that we never got to see him play this role again causes me deep spiritual pain.

Meet the most bizarre criminal of all time, a twentieth century Jekyll-Hyde!

Oh, what’s this? Not only do we get the best (arguably) screen Joker, we also get the best (FUCKING DEFINITELY) screen Two-Face. I would have liked to see a little more of Harvey’s backstory and some hints that he was grappling with Big Bad Harv’ even before the accident but I get it, the movie’s technically too long as it is. Again, a terrible waste that we never got to see Eckhart play Harvey again. The again, again, as I previously mentioned Two-Face is a character with a very short shelf-life. Once you’ve done the origin there’s not really that much left to do with him.

Fear Incarnate, Fear Walking the streets of Gotham…

“Oh I wish Cillian Murphy wasn’t in that movie” said no one fucking ever. I love that Crane is much more light-hearted and fun-loving in this one. He’s lost all pretences of being a serious, normal person and is just embracing being a scary super villain. It’s great. Really brings home that crime in Gotham hasn’t been killed. It’s just getting stranger.

The Comish

THIS is the Gordon I want to see. Tough, brilliant, badass and heart-breakingly. Oldman’s delivery of “We have to save Dent! I have to save Dent!” still brings a lump to my throat.

Our Plucky Sidekicks

Without question the most stacked supporting cast of any Batman movie. There are no small characters in this. None. Take a character like the Chechen. Incredibly small part, but packed full of great lines and lovely, revealing character moments (his bromance with Maroni is genuinely kinda sweet). Maggie Gyllenhaal will have you asking “Katie Who?”

Batman NEVER kills, except: 

To quote Lady Bracknell, to have one Two-Face fall to his death under suspicious circumstances might be considered misfortune. Two looks like carelessness. Eminently justifiable homicide. Dubious intentionality. But yeah, Batman did kill Harvey Dent. No two (ha!) ways about it.

Where does he get those wonderful toys?: 

As well as a new batsuit that allows Batman to turn his head (which might be useful in a fight) we also get Bat-Sonar, that allows Batman to use sonar to see like a submarine.

It’s the car, right? Chicks dig the car:

In keeping with the tradition that in every second movie of a Batman series the Batmobile dies, the Tumbler buys it, leaving us with the Bat-Pod, which will be Batman’s vehicle of choice for the remainder of the series.

Honestly, I prefer it. Simple, stripped back and actually suited for moving around a city.

FINAL SCORE OUT OF TEN:

NEXT UPDATE: 01 May 2024.

NEXT TIME: Come to me, my ageing millennials. I have nostalgia for you.