Heath Ledger creates a brilliant character and you can't wait for his appearance back on screen. Some of the scenes (like the one from the police car or the one where he's dressed like a nurse) are absolutely beautiful. Apart from that, there's a big nothing. Christian Bale didn't seem to be trying too hard. As great as he is, useless philosophy dialogues can't be acted, especially when the "dilemmas" are identical to the ones in the first series. The excessive hoarseness transforms him from obscure and mysterious into tired and sad. When you see him flying and killing/saving five people at a time, but then about to die in an encounter with a rottweiler, you suddenly understand why the poor bastard lost the will to live. Maggie Gyllenhaal is one of the ugliest women i've ever seen on the big screen. You'd swear she is the reincarnation of the mummy from "tales from the crypt". If they had put all the males in the movie fall in love with a boot, it would have brought a lot more credibility and a much greater emotional impact on the audience than this.The look of a senile old broad who always seems cramped because her morning enema hasn't kicked in yet transforms all the romantic scenes and the emotional preoccupations of the young female lawyer into an uglypeople.com experience. The rest of the actors are mediocre, or just plain awful. But you have nothing to demand from them with such a script. The difference between The Dark Knight and other mainstream super-hero B movies is that instead of one bad movie, you get two, stuffed together, two and a half hours which could have easily been one and a quarter. It's a lot for the mere asking. And I'm not just talking about the so exaggerated action scenes : the huge truck that tips over because of a cable, the helicopter that falls down because of another cable, the bazooka fired from a 3 m distance, and last, but not least the overwhelming scene with Batman taking down 50 men using ropes and hooks, while gazing with white eyes around him in the building. Nor am I forgetting Morgan Freeman who can listen to 30 million telephone conversations in real time, destroying the entire system after he finishes because he can't bear the thought that it's "immoral". Even when you see Two-Face looking worse than the 90's version of The Terminator, you still think maybe something good is going to turn up in this movie. Although all this makes you want to leave the hall, these aren't the biggest problems of the film, because you're willing to accept the the Hollywood spirit "we spend 'till we don't have anything left" if the story stands on its own two feet. But the story seems to be crawling like a wounded animal, and the fact that it's two and a half hours long makes the agony seem to last forever. Your eyes hurt when you see all the nursery philosophies about justice and morality, supported by the stories of wise Alfred about Cesar and the outlaws of Birmany. You get tisks in your spleen when you see the woman-cop with the hospitalized mother, the martyr prisoners or the emblematic blond child who's about to die, but doesn't die and at the end thinks that Batman is good. When you realize that every ten minutes you'll be surprised by another twist in the story you start feeling a slight internal bleeding. And when you see that the witty plans of blowing up Gotham are still at the level of the well known 80's cartoons you can't handle the pressure anymore and the blood starts gushing out through your nose. At the end you can't help but wondering just how stoned the writers were when they came up with all thin nonsense and why you decided to waste your money on the ticket when you could have spent it on something better. Overall, the movie is neither dark, nor gritty, not even psychological. It's a great Heath Ledger, a hoarse Bale, a horrifying Maggie and a brass band of bad guys so well packed in a jar of pickles, that not even a fibster could breath. A movie sold thanks to an extraordinary man, who didn't live to see his outstanding performance. Unfortunately, the rest of the Hollywood stars, writers, producers and promoters didn't move at all. They probably just laughed their brains out when they saw the huge rate that this movie got on IMDb.