Critic-and-crowd pleaser is raucously uninspiring (4/10)

Batman: Why do you want to kill me?
The Joker: [laughs] Kill you? I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, you… you complete me.

As we’re leaving the theater, I ask Bill, of the other couple we went with, what he thinks of the movie. “Well, I feel it’s just like the half-dozen previews—one of them was the new Bond flick—we had to sit thru: excessively loud and excessively violent.” Bill pretty much nails it.  Plus, it takes forever (152 minutes) to reach the end of this particularly long and convoluted bat cave.  My take: if you like playing richly textured, complex, viscerally violent video games in surround-sound at 90 decibels, this movie is for you.

In terms of acclaim and popular appeal, the Dark Knight Batman ranks up there with the highest rated movies of all time; IMDb gives it an unheard of 9.3 rating, Rotten Tomatoes (RT) a 94%. The critics mostly render some version of the RT synopsis: Continue reading →