There’s more thematic substance packed into The Dark Knight than what you might find in three or four typical summer blockbusters combined… and I’m just not so sure that’s a good thing. So the best thing about the latest Batman flick is that it’s not shallow. The worst thing is that it doesn’t feel like an awful lot of fun.

This time out, Christian Bale picks up the cowl where he left off in the phenomenally popular Batman Begins. Returning director Christopher Nolan’s vision for Bruce Wayne is certainly dark—as the tradition calls for—and not at all reminiscent of the campy TV series featuring Adam West. Bale’s Wayne, then, is a high-rolling socialite and playboy, almost a cad… not unlike Iron Man’s Tony Stark, just missing the sense of fun that was conveyed by Robert Downey, Jr., in that film.

And in this latest installment, Wayne comes up hard against the darkest impulses of crusaders everywhere.

The tale this time focuses on two of Batman’s legendary arch-nemeses, The Joker and Harvey “Two-Face” Dent. (Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably are aware that The Joker was actor Heath Ledger’s final completed performance before dying of a drug overdose earlier this year.) The Dark Knight opens with a cleverly-staged bank heist masterminded by none other than… The Joker! The hook is that he’s not stealing money from honest, hard-working citizens; he’s hitting organized crime where it hurts by ripping off their money-laundering institutions.

From here, the story spins off into several subplots involving: The Joker’s attempts to take over the city’s internationally-organized-crime power structure; Gotham’s ambivalence about the Batman (who is both a wanted man and “a symbol that we don’t have to be afraid of scum”); Batman’s attempts to bring The Joker down; The Joker’s elaborate psychopathy… and the crusading anti-crime efforts of Gotham’s chief prosecutor, Harvey Dent.

I’ll be honest. The performance to write home about—and the major surprise of the movie, frankly—is not Ledger’s Joker. It’s Aaron Eckhart’s Dent. This is no simple back-story tale for Two-Face; instead, we get a solid characterization and a fully-developed love triangle between Dent, Wayne, and Wayne’s long-time love interest Rachel Dawes.

It’s also worth noting that the film doesn’t bother toeing the line with regard to Dent’s transformation into Two-Face. Rather, Nolan’s screenplay—co-written with his brother Jonathan—firmly establishes Dent as Gotham’s “White Knight,” a straight-shooting, witness-punching, uncompromising heir-apparent to the reputation-challenged Caped Crusader. Nolan’s script isn’t just content with selling Dawes and Wayne on Dent’s credibility, either; it sells the audience wholly, too.

It’s fascinating, really, seeing Eckhart flesh out this role—especially considering the hype around both Bale’s and Ledger’s performances. I found the digital manipulation of Bale’s voice as the Batman distracting—and even found myself wondering from time to time if they’d recruited John Sayles to hide behind the cowl. The effect draws far too much attention to Bale’s mouth.

Ledger’s Joker is also not his best work. The performance is far too reminiscent of Bill Nighy’s turn as Davy Jones in the Pirates films, and is also unnervingly redolent of a Philip Seymour Hoffman impression.

Sadly, all of the fine performances (including Eckhart’s, plus solid work by Gary Oldman as Lt. Gordon, Michael Caine as Alfred, and Morgan Freeman as tech whiz Lucius Fox) become irrelevant to yet another summer blockbuster effects and mayhem extravaganza.

It’s a pity, too, because (like At World’s End last summer) this is a film that will bear up under repeated viewing… if you are willing to feel bludgeoned by your entertainment.

Where World’s End was a sophisticated and multi-layered commentary on art and the film business, The Dark Knight is a complex and challenging look at international politics, terrorism, and public sentiment about justice and civil rights.

Most notably, this film is a sober-minded and pragmatic examination of what’s happened to America under the current Bush Administration… and it’s not going to offer any warm fuzzies to starry-eyed optimists hoping that either McCain or Obama are going to “change things.”

At the core of this film is Harvey Dent’s observation that you “either die a hero or you live long enough to become a villain.” It’s a mantra that even Bruce Wayne sees the sense in. Already dancing on the precarious edge of vigilante justice partly motivated by first-strike pragmatism, Batman runs into a new kind of seemingly motive-less killer/terrorist in The Joker… who knows that Batman has principles and lines that he won’t cross. The Joker uses that knowledge to his full advantage; and his aim, with both Batman and Dent, is to drive them to the point of seeing what they would “have to become” to defeat The Joker: to break them morally and turn them, too, into villains, fulfilling Dent’s prophecy.

And what happens when Wayne comes up against that point? Well, rather like our sitting President appears to have done, he doesn’t hide behind legalisms and niceties. No, Wayne takes actions remarkably similar to unconstitutional wiretapping and torture—behaving in a manner eerily similar to Brian DePalma’s Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, who declared: “I have become what I beheld, and I am content that I have done right.” It’s “the Chicago Way,” as Sean Connery’s Malone observed in that film. (Screenwriters David Mamet and Jonathan Nolan were both raised in Chicago, not surprisingly.) The Dark Knight is a serious look at what happens to “decent men in indecent times,” an affirmation that in the “real world,” sometimes “the truth isn’t good enough.” It ultimately argues that we value a “guardian and protector” more than we value a “hero.”

And yet it’s not all pessimism and dark pragmatism. The film also offers a stirring look at the human capacity for self-sacrifice, principled action in the face of disaster, and the goodness of men and women alike. I would have preferred to see more of this sort of affirmation from the film, though, and less of Nolan’s darkness and free-wheeling penchant for short-shrifting admittedly throw-away scenes. It’s nice that he doesn’t buy into the false tension of red-herring set pieces at the 100-minute mark; but by the third or fourth time the film failed to present me the full outcome of such scenes, I was left shaking my head in mystification. (I did prefer the IMAX presentation to digital projection, however… though digital audio in a state-of-the-art auditorium gets the edge.)

I just wonder what the movie-going public will make of all of this. If The Dark Knight resonates with audiences in a big way, the film could be a harbinger of bad news for Obama in the fall… particularly given how poorly anti-Bush films have fared at the boxoffice. Movies are bellwethers for public sentiment, and this is one that politicos on either side of the aisle would do well to watch closely.

The Dark Knight is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and some menace.” To the film’s credit, the camera turns away from a good deal of gruesome stuff. So in one sense, it feels almost like a PG film. But the attitude behind the violence, and much of its setting, is darkly dark indeed. I think the rating is more than fair.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of The Dark Knight.