Review: Batman in the Dark Night at Llandudno Junction

Jul 31 2008 by Richard Evans, North Wales Weekly News

THE Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen this year by a mile.

The epic DC Comics inspired sequel starts where Batman Begins ended; a joker calling card is left following a gang of armed robbers targeting a mob-controlled bank.

While the police plan to hunt down the thieves they also cite Batman (Christian Bale) as a wanted man and an illegal vigilante who takes the law into his own hands. However, lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) hail Batman’s heroics and accept Gotham needs the anti-hero.

Meanwhile a psychotic facially scarred gangster dubbed the Joker (Heath Ledger) pledges he will kill Batman in return for half of the mob’s money, which is being laundered in Hong Kong by a Chinese gangster away from the hands of Gotham City’s police department.

In the meantime billionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne continues to wine and dine the women of Gotham while he has one eye on the relationship between Dent and his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

While I enjoyed Batman Begins and the film’s depiction of Bruce Wayne losing himself in the criminal underworld and his martial arts training, it tailed off towards the end of the movie, largely because of the absence of a truly bad to the bone villain .

The hype surrounding this film is part down to it being Heath Ledger’s epitaph. But it is Ledger’s performance which truly steals the show and he probably eclipses Jack Nicholson’s critically acclaimed performance in the 1989 film, Batman.

In short The Dark Knight is a brilliant gangster movie dressed up a cape and mask. First class.

9/10