Heath Ledger gives a great performance in this film. He deserved his Oscar. It was a strong performance. He's also the worst part of the film for a very simple reason: He wasn't playing the Joker.

When Batman Begins ended and Commissioner Gordon flipped over that Joker card, audiences went wild. We knew what that meant. We knew the Joker. We liked the Joker. That scene got applause because audiences wanted to see the Joker. No one was thinking, "I hope they reinvent the Joker from the ground up!" We already liked the Joker as-is.

In the comics and cartoons and the 1966 series and Batman (1989) the Joker was always consistent. There weren't different 'versions' of the Joker. He was always the same. White skin, maniacal laugh, purple suit...the only thing that changed was how crazy or how psycho he was. Cesar Romero's Joker was less likely to kill someone than Jack Nicholson's but other than that, they were very much the same.

In 2008 for the first time in the character's history, he was 're- invented'. Ledger's Joker was wildly different from any Joker we'd seen before. And (as noted above) he was brilliant in the role. But there is an old saying: "If it's not broke, don't fix it". Joker wasn't broken. He didn't need reinventing.

It's sad what this movie did to the character. After this movie, they changed him in the comics too. Suddenly he was doing crap like cutting people's faces off. Then they felt the need to 're-invent' the character again for 2016's Suicide Squad.

I just want the classic Joker back. He was great. He didn't need improving.