The Dark Knight (+ Digital Copy and BD Live) [Blu-ray]

I bought the movie for my son who is 17. He loves this movie. I watched it Christmas night with him and I felt the City of Gotham rather depressing but the acting and the movie was well made.

I thought that the buzz about an Oscar for Heath Ledger as the Joker was over-hype. No! It's well deserved. An excellent follow-up to Batman Begins. A great comic book movie! No sleeping through this movie. I thought that it almost crossed the PG-13 line into R territory.

Great Movie, not for Kids.
My husband loved it as a Christmas present.
We would recomended even if you do not like superheroes movies.

I know that because of Heath's untimely and highly tragedic (for his young daughter and family) death we all are supposed to be blown away by his Joker and this film in general. Sad to say, I was less than overwhelmed. Anyone who has studied acting knows that you don't play the "crazy role" at full blast the entire time. It becomes tiresome and overbearing on your audience. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Mr. Ledger did. While his Joker was light years above Nickleson's in terms of being a truly threatening criminal mastermind, I never understood the real reason why he was so determined to enslave Gotham City. Nickleson's Joker had pretty clear cut goals and motives; Ledger's seems to simply be a Loki type character that, while his story began interestingly enough, was not enough to carry a rather mediocre film and never really drew me in. People compared Ledger's Joker to Hannibal Lector, to me this is blasphemy. Lector has so many layers and so much depth that we never even scratch the surface of who he truly is at the core. The Joker never becomes that enigmatic and thus this viewer was never really drawn in or motivated enough to care what happens to the character or how he was created. An abused child? Sorry, that tale, while incredibly sad, is not enough to make me believe that it would transform someone into a being would wants to destroy everything civilized in favour of chaos.
Speaking of unbelievable, the Harvey Dent character was probably the worst offender of this film in that regard. I don't care how much you love someone or how much life sucks because someone deformed you, you're not going to go from being Mr. Moral to threatening the murder of an innocent child whose father didn't even have anything to do with Rachel's death. Why not simply kill the freak who actually did it? Why believe the Joker, the one who you know has caused all of your pain, over someone who tried his best to help save you and your girl? It made no sense.
Lastly, I loved Bale in "Batman Begins". He is the one and only Batman that I have ever liked or would believe as the character (who was the genius who came up wth the idea of casting Mr. Mom as Batman? Seriously, that was a crime against humanity). Michael Caine, as always, was excellent as Alfred and I really liked Morgan Freeman and his Michael Moore stance on wiretapping, but Bale was not used well here. His voice was beyond ridiculous, and it was pretty obvious that the director only cared about presenting one character in this film. It should had been called "The Joker", because this film has little to do with Batman. I wasn't thrilled with Maggie, but if Katie Holmes, like Vin Diesil, wishes to wreck her career by bowing out of blockbuster sequels in favour of straight to dvd quality films that no one sees then that's her business.
To close, in my opinion had Heath not died shortly after production this film would never had received the kind of attention and praise that it did. It sounds cruel, but Heath's dying is the only thing that truly had the critics buzzing. No one wishes to speak ill of the dead. To me, this was not the deep psychological ride that everyone made it out to be and I was grossly disappointed. I know that people will write that I'm a twit and can't appreciate the depth of the film, but it simply rang hollow for me. The Joker's challenges were nothing new; there are four "Saw" films that use the exact same set up to show humanity's inner depravity when push comes to shove. Sorry, I just wasn't thrilled.

I dont have to tell you how great this movie is, but it arrived on time and i was satisfied