The Plot: The war on crime in Gotham is being won by the good guys - Batman, Lt. Gordon and DA Harvey Dent - until the arrival of an anarchist criminal known as the Joker.  His terrorist tactics throw the city into chaos even as Bruce Wayne must deal with personal issues as well.

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The Flax Take:
There’s a story arc from the Batman comic book in the late 1980s during which, at one point, Batman gets so mad at Superman that he punches him right in the face.  Superman, naturally, is unfazed; Batman grimaces and suggests that he may have broken a couple of knuckles.  When you come right down to it, this is what is most compelling about Batman as a character – he is virtually alone among major superheroes in having no actual superpowers.  He’s just a guy with a lot of gadgets and even more nerve.  The mere fact that he’s human makes him all the more interesting.  So why does Christopher Nolan insist on making him so boring?

The Dark Knight, like Batman Begins before it, pays lip service to Batman’s vulnerability, in a sequence early in the film where Batman is attacked by a dog and later reveals a number of injuries while changing.  Then, like Batman Begins before it, it has Bruce Wayne visit gadget-master Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) for a remedy and bingo!  Problem solved.  Making Batman invincible may free him up to engage in all kinds of entertaining setpieces, but it undercuts what seemed to be Nolan’s initial idea and strips much of what makes Batman unique among superheroes.

Perhaps this is why so much of the film and its promotional material fixates on the Joker – he’s a much more interesting character than Batman, at least in theory.  But even this turns out not really to be the case, because Nolan decided to avoid giving the Joker any specific motivation.  This turns him into more a force of nature than a character, and having him stay implausibly far ahead of the other characters at all times – until a bathetic sequence near the film’s end in which Nolan lowers the entire proceedings into the realm of up-with-people schmaltz – does nothing to diminish that problem.  The suggestion that Batman and the Joker are in some ways very similar bubbles up expectedly (to quote Charlie Kaufman, "See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this"), but the key similarity in this film is that both are curiously indestructible.  We simply don’t know enough about Heath Ledger’s Joker to say otherwise.

The film’s 150-minute bloat sprawls out like a grand crime saga – clearly Nolan’s intent – but there’s way too much going on for The Dark Knight’s good.  While it was perhaps inevitable after the crucial role they played in Begins, the crime syndicates get far too much screen time in Knight when you consider how little they really have to do.  The Joker meets with them to propose killing Batman, then makes no attempt to actually do so at any point in the film that I can remember.  Instead, the film lingers over the unrealistic cleverness of his plots to kill various secondary characters; given his general success rate, I suppose it wouldn’t have paid for Nolan to set him upon Batman from the get-go.

The principal problem I had with Batman Begins was that thanks to things like the wooden dialogue and awkward use of catchphrases, it was simply too goofy for much of its run to be taken seriously as the character’s dark rebirth that Nolan wanted.  The Dark Knight doesn’t have the same problem, mercifully, but where Begins at least tried to delve into its characters, Knight is all surface.  The only thing added to Batman’s psychological profile is that he considers hanging up the suit when it seems that the city’s woes at the Joker’s hands are attributable to him.  Then, five minutes later, he changes his mind.  It’s Spider-Man 2 all over again.  Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent is straightforward and the Joker’s real character is pretty much inscrutable.  What are we watching this for, again?

I guess it’s the action, but even most of that is curiously anticlimactic.  The scene in which Batman tracks a shady Chinese businessman to Hong Kong for the purpose of an insanely illegal “extradition” is set up with several minutes of expository dialogue that serve no purpose other than to make the actual scene seem reasonable; when the actual action takes place, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen, and the whole thing makes Batman seem even more bizarrely invincible.  Usually he’s comfortably ensconced in his Gotham milieu; throwing him into the middle of Hong Kong removes that grounding and makes the character less believable.

Perhaps even more goofy and distracting is Christian Bale’s growly Batman voice, always making it difficult to take him seriously.  One might argue that costumed superheroes are never to be taken entirely seriously, but tell that to Christopher Nolan.  Effective at plumbing the depths of his characters in films like Memento, Insomnia and The Prestige, he has somehow managed to come up short when taking on Batman.  The Dark Knight just doesn’t get into its characters; it’s too busy with the what and the who to worry a whole lot about the why (or, for that matter, the how).  The few cursory explanations of events just don’t meet the standard of a film that wants to be as complex as this one does.  It’s generally well-executed, but the level of thought put into the characters simply never rises to the occasion.  More detail went into what’s on the Joker’s face than what’s inside his head, and that, to me, doesn’t go far enough.