This movie should be named "Life With Batman", because by the end of it you will have felt like you've spent half of your life with Bruce Wayne & Co. I am really surprised that there are SO many glowing user reviews here. This movie has its moments, but it really is WAY TOO LONG & SELF-INDULGENT!!! I generally like comic books & comic book-movies, but Dark Knight really misses the mark for me. Someone should've had the courage to tell Christopher Nolan to reign this in a bit and trim things down. I had already set low expectations for this, as it is the usual over-hyped sequel. For a while the movie pleasantly surprised me and exceeded my expectations handily. Foremost, I did not expect Heath Ledger's performance to be as good as the hype. But, he definitely did pull off a brutal & realistic portrayal of a terribly disturbed psychopath. The scenes with Joker should have stayed. The "extra stuffing" should have been trimmed (namely a whole mid-movie sub thread with Two-Face, and unnecessary exposition with Gordon & others).

While "Batman Begins" was a flawed but excellent movie, "The Dark Knight" is a flawed but monolithic schizophrenic of a movie. From an early scene with 'copycat' heroes & villains, to bad Two-Face makeup & his unbelievable subplot; this is a movie that wants to be "so Serious", but should take its own advice from Joker: "Why So Serious?" --This was a problem that peeped its head out in the first movie (an incredibly realistic portrayal of Batman, marred by silly fantastical leaps-from-reality like "remote control bats" to "Batmobile indiscriminately crushing cop cars --the good guys-- to save his girl"). In this movie, these type of moments are multiplied 10-fold and really do a disservice to all the good scenes that ARE in the film.

Performances are all up-to-par, with Ledger stealing the show, but Maggie Gyllenhaul really PALES in comparison to Katie Holmes. (What, did Cruise have her under lock-and-key like the tabloids say?) Katie is way cuter & sexier, and just a better fit for the role. Here again, in the utter sincerity of the acting, this just makes the end scenes with a hopelessly silly melodramatic plot device make fun of all those great Caine, Ledger, & Bale performances that came before it.

I wish I could make my own cut of this movie. With some judicious splicing (and some large removals of Two-Face scenes), this movie could be a 90min wild ride with standout performances & great cat-and-mouse play between Batman & Joker. Instead, it's an overlong ode to Hollywood excess and over-indulgence that (in its end, although no were near AS bad) eventually reminded me of Spider-man 3's "lost ways".