One man who takes the cake and walks away with it with aplomb, while everyone else can just stand and look at him in awe, is Heath Ledger. He deserves an Oscar for his performance as Joker in The Dark Knight!
I am not much of a Batman fan and am also quite neutral towards comic book cinema! Which implies that neither am I averse to them nor do I crave to watch them. I really enjoyed the Spiderman movies, The Incredibles & Ice Age a lot.
But the above premise is quite baseless simply because "Batman - The Dark Knight"(TDK) does not seem to be a regular comic book cinema. In fact, Batman has always had depth and human philosophy sprayed into it.(More avid readers of Batman would know). And thus, TDK comes out as a special movie with a lot of challenging and convoluted thought processes being exposed to the audience.
The Joker’s monologues, and his confrontations with The Batman are a piece of art and worth being quoted time and again!
For eg - The Joker says, to Batman, "You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you, because you’re just too much fun"
Or this one, "Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything
becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about
chaos? It’s fair."
And then theres a gem from The Joker when he makes a proposition, to a group of rich goons, that he can kill Batman. So they question him as to why hasn’t the Joker done it already. He responds with a wicked grin, "If you’re good at something, never do it for free."
The impact of the dialogues is powerfully captured and enhanced by Heath Ledger! And not just him, there are other memorable dialogues from the Batman, and Harvey Dent too. I do feel that a movie with such good dialogues has come after quite a while
The introduction of the "Two faced" character / Harvey Dent(played very well by the Nick Naylor of "Thank You For Smoking" fame) comes a little too late, and the movie does get too long and stretched out by the end of it.
Christian Bale lives upto the expectation as Batman and Maggie (As Rachel) is a not-so-bad proposition as his(and Harvey’s) love angle.
The action, and the drama around it, all the strategising, the cat and mouse games etc is done to perfection. But the humor and the darkness of the humor is what remains etched in your mind even after the movie is over! There are no dull moments in the movie, however, it does get dark and depressing at times. But thats been the Batman legacy.
If one loves batman, then why not, Enjoy! Else, if one is looking for some serious mildly dark humor action flick and is not averse to a little bit of grossness and morbid thoughts, then one can savor this masterpiece very well.
You see, there are no rules to enjoying something! as the Joker says, "The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules!"