Saturday, July 26, 2008

Shawn's Dark Knight Review

2008 Movie #72 - The Dark Knight

I actually saw this badboy opening night. God I miss the days of punctual movie review writing. There's really no need to give this a movie a big introduction. You all know what it is, its been hyped for literally months and months now. The question on everyones mind of course was whether or not this one could live up to the crazy amounts of hype it had been give over that time. Well since the movie has been out for 9 days now and has broken pretty much every box office record it could break, and is well on its way to breaking even more, not to mention the across the board great reviews and it's current #1 spot on the IMDB top 250, I think it's pretty safe to say that yes, people seem to like this movie. With damn good reason too because the movie itself is just fantastic.

You know I really don't know what else to say about this movie that hasn't already been said hundreds of times on the internet already. Everything about the movie is just spot on. Would I say this is the best comic book movie of all time? I'm not sure about that but offhand I can't think of one that's better. So in fact it just might be.

The movie is of course 2 and a half hours long but you will never once feel like it's going on for too long. The movie actually feels more like an epic crime drama than a comic book movie. The story is fantastic though. It keeps you guessing and never lets you out of it's grip of awesome for even a second. By the end of the movie you're begging the movie to stop being so awesome because you just can't handle it anymore. The movie however never listens to you. It continues to hurl awesome at you and never relents.

A lot has been said in advance of Heath Ledger and again, it's not hype because he's amazing in the role of the Joker and is completely different than any other take on the character that has been done up until this point. His Joker is insane and just terrifying and almost all of his scenes get you on the edge of your seat because you just have no fucking clue what the man is going to do next. It really does make the loss of Ledger more tragic because this role would have done amazing things for him.

Everyone else is fantastic too. Bale is one of my favourite actors and continues to shine in the role, even if his Batman voice is just a tad on the ridiculous side. Morgan Freeman gets more to do this time around which of course is always a good thing. Aaron Eckhart I would rank pretty close to Ledger in regards to the best performance in the movie. His character arc is both tragic and fascinating to watch. This one also features a lot more action than Batman Begins and all of those sequences are very well done. The boat part at the end had me actually go long periods of time without breathing, thats how fucking into it I was.

It's really hard to believe how far the Batman movies have come. I mean think back to Batman Forever and how Two Face was in that movie compared to this one. He was a fucking cartoon then but now he will scare the shit out of you and your children. No Bat skates or Bat shark repellant or fucking Bat credit cards anymore, just 100% pure ass kickery. Nobody whose reading this hasn't seen this yet and is probably already working on their second or third time watching it. I still don't know if I would put this above Wall-e, and I certainly can't agree it;'s the best movie ever made (IMDB again), but this is a classic thats for damn sure.

5/5

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