Believe the hype: The Dark Knight is that good... but it's not all Heath Ledger's show...
First off let me say I didn't think Batman Begins was that great.
The 2005 reboot of the franchise that was all but killed off by the batsuit-nippled nineties was a good origin story explaining why billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (Welsh-born actor Christian Bale) decides to spend his nights cleansing the streets of Gotham City of criminal scum.
But I didn't really get why everyone thought it was the best superhero movie ever.
Its follow up, The Dark Knight, has been given the same plaudits and its devastating box office take (experts reckon it will finish second to all-time mega-hit Titanic) seems to back that up.
Well this time I think the critical praise is justified.
This time around Batman is thinking of hanging up his cape for good in favour of 'White Knight' new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as the people need a 'hero with a face'.
Batman's frightened The Mob enough to give the newly inspired citizenry and their civil servants room to fight their own fights without a shadowy vigilante breaking the law on their behalf all the time.
But there's a new freak in town called The Joker (Heath Ledger) who is something the Batman can't understand and can't fight. A man who, as Batman's butler Alfred (Sir Michael Caine) surmises, "Just wants to watch the world burn".
That's the question at the heart of the movie really as The Joker, a never explained force of nature who blasts across the screen in a twitching, tongue flicking, slash of scars and smeared make-up rips down the world around him seemingly just for fun.
How do you stop someone who doesn't have anything to lose without compromising your own beliefs?
The movie couldn't be clearer in its references to modern murky history: chained prisoners getting confessions beaten out of them, hospitals exploding, cities held to ransom and populations fleeing, video interviews of soon-to-be-murdered hostages. The Joker is explicitly referred to as a terrorist and worse still he doesn't want money.
In one electrifying scene as the Joker goads Batman into savagely beating him up he crystallises the quandary using Batman's famous promise to never kill anyone: "Tonight you're going to break your one rule."
Will Batman lose his morals? Will Gotham itself? That's what the Joker wants to know - when push comes to shove how ruthless can a 'normal' person get?
In short its pretty clever, and a lot deeper than most blockbuster fare, though the Joker's take on the 'cannibalstic' selfishness of society might get a little dark for some, especially kiddies, as I reckon The Dark Knight was lucky to get a 12A certificate.
But lest we forget this is a superhero movie meant to be enjoyed rather than fretted over.
The action is delivered in spades. I was a little disappointed in the fight choreography (punch, punch, break arm, punch) and some of the set-pieces seemed a little pedestrian despite multiple rocket grenades and exploding helicopters.
But an opening-sequence bank job which introduces The Joker is thrilling and economic in its story telling, a brief kidnapping jaunt to Hong Kong makes the most of Batman's gadget catalogue, and a middle section where the joker's plans reach fruition are edge-of-the-seat thrilling.
The twisty plotting is worthy of Christopher Nolan the British director of Memento and The Prestige, though after a while you do start to see through the Joker's plans a little quicker than his nemesis.
The cast is uniformly excellent from Bale's glowering but still human (and often quite funny) Bruce Wayne to Gary Oldman's downtrodden Lieutenant Gordon, and Maggie Gyllenhaal admirably replaces the terrible Katie Holmes as Bruce's long-lost love (I actually believed she could be a lawyer!).
The ever-reliable Morgan Freeman pops up again from the first film and Michael Caine provides the conscience for our violent anti-hero.
Yes Heath Ledger (he's dead, did you hear?) is the main draw but the Joker character is as well written as he is acted. There's something thrilling and scary about a character that has no rules, that could perpetrate any dirty deed (and does). And it's not as if he steamrolls everyone else.
Square jawed all-American Aaron Eckhart is great as the crusading Harvey Dent, always just on the edge of toppling off his pedestal, and Bale returns to snatch the film back to Batman at the end as we find out just why it's called The Dark Knight.
It was a sweltering night at Switch Island cinema but after a two and a half hour run time I only realised as the lights came on, I was so enthralled.
The Dark Knight is a superior slice of fantasy grounded in a world worryingly close to our own which may provoke a few awkward discussions on the way home. And that's a good thing.
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