Batman - The Dark Knight

With Christian Bale and (the late) Heath Ledger. 2½ hours. Rating : ****½ (out of 5*). This Weekend We Saw... Actually, it's been a couple weekends. No need to give background on B:TDK, since everyone and his brother has also seen it. We went the second weekend (at 4:30 Saturday afternoon), and surprisingly, the theater was only half-full. What's To Like... Great action. Great acting. Great city shots of Chicago and Hong Kong. A very dark treatment of Batman, but hey, that was true in the previous film - Batman Begins. The 2½ hours went by very quickly. Oh, and the "wannabee Batmen" were a nice touch. Heath Ledger is superb as the Joker. There's nothing funny about him, as opposed to the way Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero played him. He steals the spotlight from Bale's Batman, but then again, that's been happening since the TV series. There are some nice twists, such as when the Joker kidnaps both the promising DA and Batman's ex-GF, and puts them in two widely-separated warehouses with (of course) bombs. Batman (seemingly) only has time to save one of them. Guess how this gets resolved. Wrong! Oh yeah, and there's no Robin. That's a plus. What's Not To Like... It was best not to try and make logic out of the plot. The Joker knocks over a mob-run bank, and offs its mob-manager. The ethnically-diverse (yeah right) mobsters meet, only to find some Chinese guy has inexplicably taken all their money to Hong Kong. For equally obscure reasons, Batman takes it upon himself to go there and recover the money and bad guy. The Chinese miscreant is eventually done in by The Joker. The mob forgives the Joker for robbing them, and agrees to give him half their money. Confused yet? Me too. Who wants to think anyway... Okay, see all those plot problems? Forget about them. Nobody goes to a Batman movie to critique its plausibility. B:TDK is great entertainment. I don't think I'm ready to claim it's the best movie of 2008, and I won't automtcially concede the Oscar & Academy Awards (what's the difference between those two anyway?) to Ledger, although his untimely demise certainly improved his already-good chances. Come the end of December, B:TDK will surely be in the Top Five movies of the year, so we'll give it four-and-a-half stars, only cuz I'm mighty stingy with my 5-star ratings.