‘The Dark Knight’ Movie Review – Best Comic Book Film Ever? Hell Yes…

I finally got the chance to see The Dark Knight on Thursday after waiting a week longer than the US, for it to come to the UK. But the wait started way before that, with my anticipation to see this movie starting months ago when we heard rumours of plot lines, casting details, and on-set reports. With that long of a wait, and that amount of hope for this to be a great film, surely it could only manage to fail to live up to the hype? Luckily, no, as in the main, this movie absolutely rocks. It rocks so much that I’d go so far as to call it the best comic book movie ever made. And for someone geeky enough to watch every single one, that’s quite a claim.

The movie is long, clocking in at two and a half hours, and that was a problem for my butt, as it went to sleep about 90 minutes in. My eyes, and brain stayed switched on to the action though, as the storyline fits together well, and the plot building up to not one, but two crescendos. So much so that I thought the film was about to end at one point, only for the whole roller-coaster ride to start again without warning.

Bale is brilliant as Batman, and is probably the best on screen representation of the character I have ever seen. But his is not the best performance in the film, with Heath Ledger bringing The Joker to whole new levels of despair, and devilment. Regardless of whether Ledger had died not long after the end of the ending of the shoot or not, his performance would have been remembered for years to come as a prime example of method acting at its finest. The rest of the cast is also superb, with Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine putting in brilliant supporting role performances. My only disappointment was Maggie Gyllenhaal, who completely failed to enchant me as Batman’s love interest.

The title of the film not only applies to the characterisation of Batman, and the plot line, but also to the look, and feel of the movie as a whole. It’s dark, and brooding, and the whole thing has a much more sinister feel to it than any comic book movie I have ever seen. Some will hate this aspect of the movie, but I for one adored it.

The pacing is superb, with dips and troughs along the way to allow the audience time to recover between all-out actions sequences. There were also some nice touches along the way in terms of throwing forwards for character development, especially true of Eckhart’s Harvey Dent/Two-Face character.

What amazed me the most about the film wasn’t actually anything I saw on screen, but what I saw in the cinema I watched it. The Dark Knight was a sell-out, which I haven’t seen at a British cinema I’ve attended for years. And everyone laughed, cheered, jumped, and grimaced in all the right places. Everyone who left seemed to be saying good things about it too, which again hasn’t been known for a good, long while.

This is a film for everyone, young and old, comic book lovers, and just theatregoers in general. I can’t see many being disappointed with what they see either, which is a brilliant film, with some brilliant performances by actors at the top of their game.