Old Two-Face has a mission of his own, and like the Joker, he can be a one-man plague–but with some of the poignance of classic tragedy. He’s brave and ballsy enough to fight the Mob and the Joker, but when a tragedy makes his guilt roil, Dent gets bent. The other would-be hero on a downward spiral is the district attorney. No secret, no Batman–just a moneybags with a Messiah complex. Or rather, the film is, since the informing principle of any franchise is perpetuation of the series.
THE DARK KNIGHT HD FREEMOVIE MOVIE
A modest request from the bin Laden of movie villains, yet Bruce is reluctant. So the Joker starts preying on Rachel, and he says he’ll stop terrorizing Gotham if Batman will come out from under the mask. He knows that Batman has two vulnerable spots: his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, assuming the role Katie Holmes had in the first film) and his hidden identity.
The Joker may be insane, but he’s a shrewd judge of character. Why, he might blow up a hospital or turn ordinary people into mass murderers to save their own lives. Evil is his tenor sax, Armageddon his melody. The Joker observes no rules, pursues no grand scheme he’s the terrorist as improv artist. Echoing the sly psychopathy and scary singsong voice of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Ledger!), Ledger carries in him the deranged threat of a punk star like Sid Vicious, whom he supposedly took as one of the models for his character. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history.Īnd the actor, who died in January at 28 of an accidental prescription-drug overdose, is magnificent.
And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he’s not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. He knows what he is: an “agent of chaos.” Your worst nightmare. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, aids and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. In its rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg’s 1986 version of The Fly. “This town,” he says, “deserves a better class of criminals.” So do action movies, and here he is, vowing to bring down Batman and Dent, just for the mad fun of it. He makes a point with his pencil by ramming it into a gangster’s head. He does deals with the Mob, then crosses them up. The Mob (led by Eric Roberts) they can handle, with the help of stalwart police lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman). Gotham has a new white knight: a fearless district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who’s determined to nab malefactors through the law with the same gusto that Batman, the dark knight, applies using his gadgets and charisma. Batman Begins, the 2005 film that launched Nolan’s series, was a mere five-finger exercise. It’s as black–and teeming and toxic–as the mind of the Joker. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. Even the tie-in action figures with Reese’s Pieces suggest this is a fast-food movie.īut Nolan has a more subversive agenda. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger’s Joker, spectacular chases–including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels–and lots of stuff blowing up. ( The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.) It’s been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn’t disappoint. It’s the fifth, and three of the first four ( Iron Man, Wanted and Hellboy II) have been terrific or just short of it. The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season’s earlier movies based on comic books.