Saw The Dark Knight last night...

I'll second the pan.

A great groaning gasbag of a movie. Witless, charmless, leaden and incoherent. Ledger acts the makeup. Bale - the hoarse whisperer - lisps or growls. Morgan Freeman looks for something - anything - to do. Maggie G. spends the movie peeking over the broad shoulders of her leading men, as if searching for an exit from the soundstage. Don't bother asking why anything happens - or to whom - it just does. Sterile, poorly paced chase scenes bracketed by underexposed, poorly staged fight scenes punctuated all too often by dialogue so portentous as to have been cribbed from a Learning Annex syllabus entitled "Nihilism and Existentialism: The Philosophical One-Two Punch of 21st Century American Vanity and Self-Loathing."

Two and half hours of ponderous nonsense.

 

That's it? When you find something you only kinda like, or hate, you revisit the thread a dozen times with "..." observations. The best movie you've seen in a decade, and that's all you've got? Color me disappointed.

Someone who knows mizzou, send the cops over for a "welfare check."

 

Saw the movie and loved it. Ledger was great and Bale was, well, Bale. I thought Eckhart was very good, it can't be easy for an actor to change from good to bad in the middle of a film.
One thing that troubles me, hasn't Morgan Freeman been playing the same character in all his films since Shawshank? He is always the wise elderly man.

 

If you didn't like it, fine, but that there is simply ridiculous, smacking of the pretentious "if everyone loves it so much, I can be cool by hating it" approach. A small fraction of serious critics didn't like it, and there are certainly legitimate criticisms, but nobody said it was awful. You thought everything and everyone about it was bad? I can't think of many movies I've EVER seen that would merit your blanket condemnation of every facet.

And if you think Ledger "acts the makeup," well, I can't help you.

 

Nothing pretentious about it, Arnold. I thought it was egregiously bad. I went in wanting to like it. But I think it's the most overrated movie of the last ten years.

 

Should I go watch this in 40 minutes, or should I not ruin "Step Brothers," which I saw a couple of hours ago?

 

Agreed, especially that last comment.

 

Overrated is everyone saying it's a 10 when you think it's a five. Your initial post looks like everyone thinks it's a 10 but you think it's a negative 5,000. I've seen exaggerations of how good it is, but nothing to compare with your exaggeration of how bad it is.

Then again, I'm all about eschewing the black and white in favor of everything existing in the gray. Call me the Charcoal Knight.

 

I'd go see The Dark Knight. It's a quality flic.

 

Saw it today. Loved it.

While it is extremely dark, I disagreed with the complete and total nihilism claim by the esteemed mr. jgmacg. Felt the scenes on the ferries showed at least a glimmer of the other side of human nature. Loved the scene where Tiny Lister took the detonator from the warden, saying he'd do what should've been done 15 minutes ago, and threw it in the ocean.

Ledger was amazing. Totally disagree that he "acted the makeup." Nicholson? OK, HE acted the makeup. Ledger took it to a very dark, disturbing place. For me, it was the little things--the constant lip-licking, for example.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I can't see how you could watch this movie and come away saying it was ponderous nonsense. At the very least, it was well-made.

 

Go. See. It.

 

Just got back.

I must say, my reaction is somewhere in the vast expanse of middle between the majority on here and jgmacg's critique.

Heath Ledger made the movie. I don't think there was enough Joker. To be almost three hours long, there wasn't enough Joker. Aaron Eckhart did a pretty good job. Christian Bale simply is. Nothing bad, nothing good. He was a robot.

Whoever edited the movie didn't do a good job. No reason it should have been as long as it was. It's painfully difficult to watch Maggie Gyllenhaal for that long. She's the modern-day embodiment of Olive Oil, except with no sense of humor.

I'm glad I saw it, if for no other reason that at least I'm in the know now. Overall, I'd call it above average. However, in the past couple of years, it comes nowhere close to movies such as The Departed, Michael Clayton, Syriana, Charlie Wilson's War, American Gangster, or The Kingdom. Maybe it's just because I don't like fantasy/comic book stuff as much.

I liked Step Brothers better. May the ridicule begin ......