At two and a half hours, this is a long movie. You'll have to pay very careful attention. The film is a thick, dense maze of interwoven and continually zig zagging characters and themes. Well, you say, aren't all modern films? Yeah, but this different. It's the D.A. and the Commish and the mob, the good cops and the dirty ones, the Joker and Batman and then Two-Face. It's a lot. I have a short attention span and don't do well with "CSI" and "Law and Order" type shows; I can't keep up. This, at times, felt like an extra-long episode of "The Wire." Of course, if you dig these shows then you'll have no problem maintaining interest in a supremely sophisticated, if at times messy, crime story.

Raging underneath all that primary plot is an intellectualy rich debate about morality and shifting loyalties and the battle between what we know we're supposed to do and what we really do when we have no other choice. It's deep. But color me simple-minded. When I go to see a summer blockbuster based on a comic book, I want to see people fight. I want to see neat costumes, and nifty gadgets and things blow up. Of course there is that here -- especially the blowing up -- but these sequences are spaced, very carefully, between a philosophical dialouge on moral relativism and a complex crime story. It is exceedingly well done, but ironically, not as juvenile as I'd have hoped.

You'll have to be patient with this movie. You'll have to resist the temptation to want the heady parts to hurry up and advance so you can see more fighting. Based on the reactions of the audience I watched this with, very rarely in watching it will you hoop and holler like you did in "Spiderman." In fact, and not to give anything away, but by the end of the film you're no longer sure what villians and heroes look like any more. "Dark Knight" is not a rollercoaster movie; it's a novel.

The direction is stellar. Maggie Gyllenhaal is fun to watch. Christian Bale is stoic (but what's up with the voice he uses when he's Batman?) Of course, Heath Ledger is stunning. Whereas Jack Nicholson brought some camp to his turn (which, in a way, made his Joker sort of endearing and funny) Ledger is pretty close to frightening. He's captivating, and he was another reason I was not entirely invested in the slower scenes, because I wanted to see more of him. It is Ledger's movie, no question. This Joker's reign of terror has very little of the kind of gag-based humor of his forefather; here he is sick and demented, inside-your-brain scary, like the villian in say, "Speed." It takes a while in the film for his character to fully develop but when he does, you are sitting on the edge of your seat to see what he does next.

Again, unless you're paying very close attention, it's probable that some of the establishing motives and plot will whiz by, a blur. For this reason I'd think very hard about taking a kid, not because of the violence but because well, I'm grown and relatively smart and there were points I simply decided to zone out until the next fight/Joker scene. So the irony is that, to fully get this movie, I'd have to see it again, but I won't because, with a really thick, good complex novel, reading it once is enough.

Still, I thought it could very well qualify as a masterpiece of the comic book movie genre.

For a full review, be on the lookout for Mal Vincent's take!

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