Directed by Christopher Nolan,
Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman
Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman

When the Scarecrow, Cillian Murphy’s memorably frightening villain of Batman Begins is swiftly passed over in the Dark Knight not fifteen minutes into the film, you know that Batman’s nemeses are set to be markedly traded up. And much as the devil has all the best tunes, it is Heath Ledger’s Joker, who in that coveted, villainous role, has all the best lines. “This is what happens,” he teases Christian Bale’s Batman while being dangled from the top of a building, “when an unstoppable force meets an immoveable object!”

Christopher Nolan (Memento) directs this second installment of the franchise he rebooted with Batman Begins with so much dark, angst-ridden menace that it makes that first film look like a nyuk-fest – which it certainly was not. The Long Halloween inspired Gotham (in this case, actually Chicago) and Hong Kong streets are shot in a blue-hued half light, never night or day, which is a palette not dissimilar to Michael Mann’s Heat, a film which Dark Knight borrows from in an elaborate opening heist scene which sets the tone for just how many double and triple-crosses are set to take place over the next two and half hours.

The Dark Knight is long, and sometimes incredibly complicated, but it never drags. Bruce Wayne still pines for the affections of Rachael (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and not Katie Holmes, hurrah!) who is sadly for him, now in love with Gotham’s new DA, Harvey Dent (*Aaron Eckhart*). Having razed his playboy pile in the woods to the ground last time around, Bruce now runs his Batcave out of an abandoned city dockland, aided again by Morgan Freeman and his incredible array of Bat technologies. Throw into this, corrupt business dealings at Wayne enterprises, a spate of Batman copyists terrorizing the city, and his unresolved childhood traumas and things are not looking great for the caped crusader, especially not when his id arrives in the form of the Joker to further torment him.

While a great deal of comic lore goes into explaining the back stories and hence often transparent motivations of the characters, what makes Ledger’s Joker so sinister is that he lies constantly about his past. We don’t know how he came to exist or what he exists for, other than as an embodiment of chaos. In a scene sure to be the Oscar nomination clip played ad finitum, he tells a bed-ridden Two-Face, “I’m like a dog chasing a car: if I ever caught one, I wouldn’t know what to do with it!” delivered with a shrug equal parts gleeful and perplexed.

There is a lot to love about this smart, epically photographed, blockbuster where the action sequences are played out as triple-stranded, simultaneous, balletic set pieces. And while The Dark Knight is ostensibly the hero of the piece with his inflexible code of ethics, it is the Joker, Ledger’s his lip-smacking deviant who you walk away with. “You complete me,” he whines at Batman, who can’t quite concede that Gotham’s villains complete him also. And I think it’s fair to say that no other arch-rival will complete him so memorably as this Joker does, ever again.