Well…long rant short, if you disregard the late Heath Ledgers' portrayal of the Joker..this film becomes a steaming pile of rhino dung. Christain Bale is by far, one of the worst Batmans…ever. Such an overrated flick……….

Well…long rant short, if you disregard the late Heath Ledgers' portrayal of the Joker..this film becomes a steaming pile of rhino dung. Christain Bale is by far, one of the worst Batmans…ever. Such an overrated flick……….

Almost without fail in the comic books, the Joker is portrayed as a madman who nonetheless can remark to another villain that “I only say here because it’s funny” when speaking of Arkham Asylum… and the reader can genuinely believe that the Joker could leave at a whim without much trouble. It’s a very difficult performance to bring off… you have to convince the audience that the villain is actually insane while also convincing them that the villain is so fiendishly cunning that he can seize control of events and direct them like a puppeteer. I believe that the Joker actually putting a massive amount of explosives in the hospital would have been solved by widening the timeline a little because the movie establishes that the Joker can easily get access to goons that take care of the grunt work. Ledger makes the Joker a real adversary for the remarkable intellect of Batman and it is tragic that any prior movies will go forward without this movie’s chess match between two very different yet roughly equal players in a deadly game. Heath Ledger and his ability to make the Joker into what he has always been will be sorely missed.

I also enjoyed the second carrying point of the movie: the further development of Batman. The first movie established what forces pushed him onto the path that he walked; the second one examined the boundaries of the Batman’s crusade against crime. Batman is a vigilante who nonetheless will risk himself to avoid killing a remorseless psychopathic murderer. He is willing to create what Lucius Fox called an abomination to catch an evil man… then put the system’s self-destruct in the hands of the man who hated it most. He sacrificed his reputation as a doer of good just to avoid tarnishing his city’s burnished image of a highly principled district attorney who did with the law what Batman did without it. In short, we see Batman formed into a fearsome ends-justify-the-means vigilante… who draws a thick red line between himself and a maniac like the Joker. Most of all, we see that Batman genuinely wishes that the city he loved could be cleaned and protected without the billowing cape of the Batman overshadowing it. Like Ledger making the Joker into a rough Moriarty, Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan created a movie Batman that reflects the complex persona of a principled intellectual vigilante that must be a shallow irresponsible playboy for the world.

Others have suggested what villain they’d like to see for a future Christopher Nolan directed Batman movie; my answer is that I’d like to see Bane and further, to see the “Knightfall” trilogy converted into a movie of the quality of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I think that as far as a trilogy goes, it would be the perfect bookend to the development of Batman as a person in the universe at large. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Knightfall trilogy features Batman being worn down by endless crime waves engineered by Bane until he is so exhausted that Bane can reveal himself… and snap Batman’s spine, rendering him a paraplegic. Due to excellent medical help, Bruce Wayne starts on the road to recovering but in the meantime, hands the cape over to a man that he regards as a responsible guardian. The man proves to be zealous but unprincipled, so taken with the ability to suppress crime with fear that he becomes a murderer… all the while dressed in the cape of a man who has always stepped back from that abyss. Bruce Wayne eventually recovers and fights his successor for his cape… and in the end, triumphs, returning Batman to being a caped crusader, a principled vigilante who recoils from the worst evils. In my view, the book trilogy establishes exactly who the Batman is and cements him as the man who does numerous questionable things to deter and fight evil but will not destroy even the most bloodthirsty life. This would be an epic bookend to the Nolan movies if done right and firmly would set Batman on the path that logically leads to an ordinary man being regarded as equal to the superhumans and supernaturals of the Justice League.

(Besides, there are some guys who just look better with it, and he's one of them.)

As with the first and second, the third should focus on entirely NEW villains. I’d personally like to see The Ventriloquist and Scarface make their appearance. I always found their presence to be intricate, and deeply unsettling. $20 down on seeing Killer Croc in the next one, though. Or maybe, we’ll get Harley Quinn to replace Joker? Of course, I’d like to see the Animated Series version costume; not the Arkham Asylum game one. For… obvious reasons… natch.