That ghostly rotting paint job covers his scarred smile (explained by a backstory that gives you the willies, even if he just made it up), and the disturbing thing is that when Ledger’s Joker talks, with those ”Ehhh, what’s up, Doc?” vowels that make him sound like Al Franken crossed with a nerdish pedophile, you realize that the icky sloshing sound you hear is him sucking on his cheeks he uses his attachment to those scars to fuel his sadistic (and masochistic) whims. Heath Ledger’s mesmerizing, scary-funny performance begins with the creepiness of his image: the greasy long hair, the makeup that looks as if he’d drawn it on with crayons, then messed it with tears. But just as Tim Burton‘s 1989 Batman was anchored by the joy-buzzer glee of Jack Nicholson‘s party-down Joker, The Dark Knight takes its cue from its Joker and his deadly circus of chaos. It’s a ride for the gut and the brain.īale, all steely reserve, once again captivates as the haunted caped crusader who must shed morality to beat the devil at his game. The Dark Knight is jammed with thorny underworld conspiracies, obscenely oversize tank-cars, and action scenes that teeter madly out of control, all blanketed by the psycho-anarchic musings of a villain so warped he turns crime into a contest of Can you top this? At two hours and 32 minutes, this is almost too much movie, but it has a malicious, careening zest all its own. But in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan‘s ominously labyrinthine and exciting sequel to Batman Begins, good and evil aren’t just separate forces - at times, they’re a whisper away from each other - and the movie exudes a predatory glamour that makes the comic-book films that have come before it look all the more like kid stuff. Our comic-book-movie culture is 30 years old (it kicked off in 1978, with the Christopher Reeve Superman), and in those three decades of speed and light and destruction, of well-coiffed demigods in bodysuits zipping through the air and shimmying up walls, comic-book films have yielded more than their share of spectacle and thrills yet virtually nothing in the way of mystery.
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