Plot
Synopsis: Some men just want
to see the world burn.
The Good:
-The opening, we open on just Gotham during what appears to
be a hot summer day. Nothing really intimidating,
just a city during the day with tense music playing.
-The bank robbery, every one playing their role and being
eliminated one by one. As far as you
know Joker isn’t actually involved in the robbery, it’s just a bug of clowns
robbing a bank.
-Establishing Joker, everyone talks about Joker letting you
know what the character has been doing and his reputation amongst the criminal
underworld.
-Establishing that the bank is no normal bank. There is a bunch of little things that tell
you that this isn’t a normal bank. The silent
alarm doesn’t dial out to the cops (the first time I saw this I thought it
might be dialing out to Batman), the bank vault is electrified to prevent
drilling into it and the bank manager comes out blasting a shotgun. Of course it’s revealed pretty quick that it’s
a mob bank.
-“He’s out, right?” nope, nope he’s not.
-There’s a moment of Joker under a clown mask, before he’s
revealed to be the Joker, where he swaggers around the bank. He takes a few swaggering steps as he surveys
the chaos.
-When the Joker finally reveals himself is just an awesome,
unexpected moment (unless you saw a preview, or a trailer, or really anything
else but it still gave me chills the first time I saw it).
-The old grenade in the mouth joke.
-Abe Lincoln & bigfoot are Batman suspects.
-Holy shit, its Scarecrow, some continuity from the
films. They mention at the end of Begins
that Crane is still loose and we get a great cameo. He’s only in it for a few minutes but he
makes those moments WORK, son. It was
great seeing him again.
-“My dogs are hone-gree!” I love that line.
-The hockey pad bat squad.
-Entering “hassle” mode.
-You can see Batman’s fighting style this time. The fact that the fight scenes are long shots
really helps showcase his fighting style unlike the last movie which cut around
all the action.
-*Sigh* I guess I should jump down on Scarecrow’s van. It’s just sort of a defeated posture and
expression when he realizes he has to throw himself down onto Scarecrow as he
drives out.
-Great scarecrow cameo.
-Bruce and Alfred continue having a great playfully
antagonistic relationship that actually seems pretty real.
-The new Rachael Dawes, Maggie does a great job & looks
awesome in the role. Katie Holmes was
serviceable as the role in the last movie but I prefer my Rachael to be Maggie.
-The courtroom scene, the cocky, poorly dressed stoolie is
the highlight.
-Holy shit it’s Eric Roberts as Salvatore Maroni. I loves me some Eric Roberts, he’s always a
sign of quality. Not necessarily the
quality of the movie or quality of the acting but the quality of entertainment.
-Aaron Eckhart Harvey Dent’s like a boss.
-“If you try to kill a civil servant, I suggest you buy American.”
-Harvey Dent: total bad ass.
Someone almost shoots him at point blank and he’s barely rattled by it.
-“You got problems with malfunctioning equipment take it up
with maintenance.” I love how Gordon tap dances around the Batman issue and
talks past the actual question using denial and passing the buck.
-SHUT THE FUCK UP REESE!
-Bruce asleep in the boardroom
-Fox and Bruce’s relationship seems to have evolved is as
realistic as the relationship between Alfred and Bruce.
-The meeting of all the mob bosses in the empty basement
kitchen.
-Holy shit its Michael Jai White, that dude is awesome.
-Enter the Joker, I love the withering laugh that starts
somewhat real sounding but degenerates into sarcastic almost deadpan laughter.
-“I thought my jokes were bad”
-THE magic trick, it’s awesome.
-“As for the televisions so called plan...” I like how he just
completely dehumanizes the character while personifying the inanimate
television.
-“If you’re good at something never do it for free.” good
advice.
-Eric Roberts expression when Joker reveals his coat is lined
with grenades is priceless
-“He does that” I love
how Gordon is just used to Batman disappearing in mid sentence.
-Jokers origins, he tells two totally different origins which
speaks volumes about the character with overtly saying anything. It also stay’s with the comic book where
Joker has stated “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I have to have a past, I prefer it to be
multiple choice.”
-Batman infiltrates Hong Kong; the whole plan is awesome and
well executed.
-Chinese Commissioner Gordon
-“We have to fix real problem: Bathman” that character is
awesome.
-That makes me jump every time, you know what it is.
-Jokers laugh during the hostage video is pure Caesar Romero.
-The Jokers video’s are truly scary, the home made, shaky cam
just seem dark and disturbing, especially considering the content.
-Bruce’s entrance to his party, let me just show up late on a
fucking helicopter surrounded by beautiful women. Kind of a dick move but still pretty awesome.
-Bruce just walks up behind Dent and chokes him the fuck out.
-“You’re unlikely to find this out on your own” I don’t know
about that former Commissioner nobody.
-Bruce taking out a clown like a boss. Just gets his attention, knocks him out with
his own gun and then disassembles the gun and tosses it aside. Never breaks his stride once while doing it.
-Joker crashing the party, the way he just helps himself to
food and champagne while hassling the guests.
He just owns the room the moment he walks in.
-The “Thank god you have a panic room” lady is pretty hot.
-Jokers music theme, seemingly just white noise and chaos
building to a crescendo. It’s awesome, it
just builds and builds and builds until the stress becomes too much and you
have to kill a hooker just to feel some sense of relief.
-Alfred’s Burma story explains both who the Joker is and
foreshadows what it is Batman has to do to fight him.
-“Your client is one of the most wealthy and powerful men in
the planet and you believe he’s a vigilante who goes around at night and beats
criminals to a pulp with his bare hands and your plan is to blackmail him? Good luck.” way to diffuse Fox.
-Batman in the club fighting through Maroni’s thugs.
-Maroni breaking his legs is just painful to watch.
-The first glimpse of Two Face in Harvey’s behavior.
-I don’t know if I’m used to Bat Voice but it seems less
terrible in this movie. To a point where
I’m actually ok with it.
-There are a few good moments of genuine humor in this to
offset the serious tone of the movie.
-I get it! A fire truck!
I see what you did there!
-The SWAT ambush with Joker attacking the SWAT van. The way they isolate the van and then shot the
fuck out of the van with escalating weapons, he starts with a pistol, moves to
shotgun before finally going to a bazooka.
-The transition from the tumbler to the Bat Pod. The Bat Pod is way, way better than the
tumbler.
-“Rack ‘em up, rack ‘em up, rack ‘em up.”
-Joker applauds Gordon becoming Commissioner, what an ass.
-Joker’s interrogation, his manipulating words, his facial
expressions.
-Two Face’s origin, I mean it makes sense, it’s rooted in
reality, more or less. It’s a pretty
good way to create the character in the realistic world of Dark Knight.
-I agree with killing off Rachel, it helps cement Batman’s
decisions and closes any door he had in returning to a normal life. Now he really has no choice but to embrace
Batman.
-“I just want my phone call”
-“The Joker planned to be caught.” Here’s the thing with Joker’s plans. I don’t think he planned to be caught. I think he planned to kill Harvey Dent,
believing he was Batman but I think Joker’s plan changed multiple times
throughout the course of that car chase.
That’s the Joker’s greatest ability, he has no real goal and he has the
ability to adapt. At any point in that
car chase he would have achieved something he wanted: kill Harvey Dent, kill
Batman, be killed by Batman, unmask Batman, get caught so he could get Lao and into
the GCU. The thing is he can go into a
situation and have multiple goals and adapt the plan when he decides to pursue
a new goal, which could be changed totally on the fly. All the goals play into something he wants
and he doesn’t care which goal he accomplishes.
-Harvey’s pain over losing Rachel.
-Joker’s speech about Gotham needing a better class of
criminal.
-“It’s not about money; it’s about sending a message. Everything burns.” the message is the most
important thing to Joker.
-Joker talks with Harvey.
I think that Joker isn’t really a planner. It seems like he’s outright lying to Harvey,
he’s definitely manipulating Harvey and pushing him towards the dark side but I
don’t think the Joker has plans in the formal sense. As I said above, he has goals and he does
what he needs to do in order to achieve these goals but I think the word “plan”
is a little too formal because at any given time he has so many goals and all
he really wants is to achieve one of those goals, it doesn’t really matter
which one, so it appears he has these huge complex plans but really any part of
those “plans” could fail and he’d still accomplish one of his goals making it
look like all the effort was for that one thing when in reality none of it
really mattered.
-Joker’s paint stained fingers. I love small touches.
-Joker blows up a hospital... dressed as a nurse. Also his initial disappointment over the
explosion before banging on his detonator and then being surprised by the
ensuing explosion and hastily getting on a bus.
-It’s really painful to watch Harvey touch his burnt up face.
-In the scene where Maroni get’s in the limo, it’s only there
for less than a second, but there’s a guy getting grabbed as the camera pans
with Maroni as he gets into the limo, which explains how Harvey was in the limo. I love little stuff like that.
-Everything the Joker makes looks so cobbled together and
homemade, it makes everything he creates unique and gives the objects character.
-He’s reading his ‘social experiment’ rules off index
cards. I like to imagine he did this to
keep himself on message without editorializing because he knew he wouldn’t be
able to stay on task otherwise.
-The prisoner who takes the detonator from the police
officer, it goes it a totally different direction then you’d think.
-Wouldn’t it have been totally awesome if when he threw
detonator it whiffed off the window and fell to the ground?
-Two Face starts shooting e’rybody. The ultimate irony was that his hostage would
have been fine if Batman hadn’t acted and Two Face would have either been
arrested or disappeared. If they had
just let the coin decide they it would have all worked out
-I know the whole “hero we needed...” thing has gotten a lot
of criticism but I personally like it.
It takes the whole hero/villain concept that was posed at the beginning
of the movie during the dinner with Bruce and Harvey and changes it. It shows what it really means to be a hero
and to be heroic in a true sense, in a sense that no normal person can live up
to. Harvey was, for all intents and
purposes, a good person, doing the same work as Batman but when he was actually
given a hardship he crumbled and became corrupted. He was ultimately just a person, not a
shining knight or a hero and like any person he was altered by tragedy. Batman is, as the movie clubs us over the
head with, more than a person, he’s more than Bruce Wayne and therefore he has
to be incorruptible because he has no choice if he wants any of his personal
brand of insanity to mean anything.
The Bad:
-The Joker’s posture is terrible.
-Hockey pads guys line to Batman sounds so whiney, the scene gets
saved by Dr. Crane.
-“I’m not wearing hockey pads.” that line has just been taken
and made fun of so much, rightfully or not, that it has lost any and all impact
and has just become ridiculous. Although
it was probably meant to be, it got a laugh in the theater the first time I saw
it.
-“I know these briefs backwards.” it’s just not said well,
again a real whiney and pouty delivery.
-Thanks for the message hammer. This movie does get pretty heavy handed in
the message department. All the
messages. You just get beat with them
and their meaning over and over again until you kind of get sick of it.
-This plan for getting into China seems to involve a lot of people
who can now identify the Batman as well as a lot of loose ends.
-Alfred doesn’t want to put suntan lotion on a hot Russian. Is he just too old to not like young hot
ballerina’s?
-How did no one notice the scarred psychopath in the police
honor guard?
-Bruce destroys a shit ton of irreplaceable documents. What the hell?
-“Things are worse than EVAR!” pretty much all the lines I
don’t like in this movie are because they’re delivered so whiny and
forcefully. They just seem out of place.
-“I know this is a totally controversial stand but: No more
dead cops!”
-“I am the Batmin.” Harvey Dent can’t saw “man”.
-However they don’t show how Harvey get’s out of a crashed limo
after he shoots the driver but he does get out, and he’s perfectly fine when we
see him later.
-No one checked the engine room for a bomb BEFORE they left
the harbor?
-I can see that the hostages hands are duct taped to guns,
how do professional snipers not notice that?
-When the sonar goes out why doesn’t Batman just switch to
normal vision?
The Ugly:
-Maroni breaking his legs, that scene is ugly.
-Where did his suspender go?
It’s in one scene and then Joker adjusts it but it’s still in frame and
then it’s gone. No continuity error, no
matter how small or stupid, gets past me.
Final
Thoughts: I’ve seen this movie
about 12 times. No seriously. That is probably an under estimate
actually. I saw this once in theaters,
then four times back to back the day it came out on DVD and then watched it a
lot, probably twice a week, for a long time (I was unemployed when it came to
DVD and watched it a lot until I went back to school) then watched it three
times when I got it on Blu-Ray recently plus the viewing for this review. So I’ve seen this movie a shit tonne of
times. Perhaps even a metric fuck tonne
of times. I’ve seen it a lot is what I’m
saying and I’m not sick of it. There
really isn’t much more to say than that.
This is a damn near perfect movie and if by some miracle you haven’t
seen this movie then you need to see it.
Right now. Go. Go watch it.
Now.
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