DARK KNIGHT

I don't for the life of me understand the appeal of comic book movies. Has our American life really become so pathetic that we need to dream of superheroes defending us?

So I'm not exactly the target audience for DARK KNIGHT. The first third of the movie is outright terrible. Horribly written, acted, and paced, it took all my powers to stop myself from ejecting the disc.

However, when they finally let Heath Ledger's character cut loose, the movie becomes quite watchable. It's as though a different writer took over at the end of the first act. In fact, this movie has the opposite problem from many movies. Instead of sagging in the second act, that's the best part of this film.

Unfortunately, in the tradition of such shit-fests as Batman and Robin, they insist on introducing another villain in the same film (wasn't the Joker enough to fill a movie?) and we get stuck with Aaron Eckhart morphing (very slowly - TOO slowly) into Two-Face. Why? It kills the third act of the film, and drags its running time into an impossible-to-watch 2 1/2 hours. Almost as long as Benjamin's Butthole.

Obviously I'm the last person in America to see this film, so it doesn't matter whether I recommend it or not. Ledger deserves his nomination and might even win. But this movie is about as far from Best Film material as you can get. The film sounded good for the most part, although I found myself straining to hear the mumbled dialogue at many points, but otherwise is not really deserving of all the accolades.