"The Dark Knight" Fulfills Its Promise

"The Dark Knight" is a fantastic crime epic that makes for a standout in that genre if not its own. It is also accurately named, in a lot of strange ways.

It is the first Batman movie to not have Batman's name in the title. This is appropriate, because Batman is not in it much. But in considering how it is a film more about its villains than its hero, we must not confuse this with the criticism leveled at Tim Burton's two cracks at the Caped Crusader, wherein the inmates may have taken over the asylum. This is not weirdness for weirdness' sake; indeed, nothing about this lean, taut movie is for any sake other than the story's.

Its title is a red herring. The dark knight referred to is not Batman, but the corrupted and destroyed phoenix that rises from the ashes of white knight Harvey Dent, who is in strange ways the true lead character of the film.

And its title also refers to, one might say, the dark night. One of many dark nights to come.

Christopher Nolan's first entry in the saga, "Batman Begins", was not the best to come from either the director or the character. It was weighed down by too much, too much backstory, too much wandering, and most of all, too much of everyone involved looking over their shoulder at the genre-destroying "Batman & Robin" and vowing not to be that. But not being "Batman & Robin", while admirable, does not constitute being something else.

This Batman movie is something else in more ways than one.

A two-and-a-half hour movie carrying nary a second without purpose, "The Dark Knight" steps outside the conventions of the superhero film, the noir detective story or the heroic quest, or indeed any of the usual "Batman" tropes, and tells a straight-up cop drama in the post-9/11 age. More novelistic than cinematic in its plotting, in moving his hero almost to the sidelines, Nolan makes this not a story of one man's quest but of three: Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the much-believed-in Harvey Dent. These three men each have a vision to save the city and the souls of its inhabitants. The visions and the methods differ madly, but share one common thread: all fail.