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Hey the big boss of KFR is in San Diego so he asked me, Lucas, the true commissioner of Gotham, to guest blog for him for a few days.

My first order of business is to push out a Top 5 list of what irked me about The Dark Knight movie - nitpicks if you will - but none the less they brought me out of the story. I did enjoy it, but I can’t by any means call it a masterpiece:

if you haven’t seen it stay away from the spoiler heavy text below:

1. Lack of Action - where was all that cool tight Krav Maga martial arts from Batman Begins? The 2 fights I remember were very weird - one of them was in a full room of people at the Harvey Dent fundraiser party where the Joker walks in and in a brightly lit room Batman shows up - in front of all his friends, no less and gets his assed kicked. Huh? That scene pulled me out of the story.

The second one was when Batman was beating up people in a night club…another ‘huh?’ moment. Also not enough of the batmobile and the batpod cycle thing which was cool.

2. The whole Hong Kong sequence - yup, we really needed to see Bats catch the accountant otherwise it wouldn’t have made sense.

3. Harvey becomes Two-Face pretty quickly - Not only does the man who has had the flesh and hair burned off his face, and takes NO pain medication for it run around the streets of Gotham hours after the tragedy but, basically is flipped by the Joker in 2 minutes to go against everything he stood for in the first 2 hours of the movie??!!! I didn’t mind that the Joker could break him but I was hoping it would take more than a face melting and a dead girlfriend after they set him up as this white knight character - Batman wouldn’t have broken so quickly. The only reason I do kind of let this go is for the sake of the allotted time of the movie…but again if #2 was cut you could have had 10 more minutes of Harvey truly becoming Two Face.

4. Not Enough Batman - TDK reminded me more of Batman Returns where Bats is relegated to a supporting character so that the Penguin and Catwoman can have more screen time. TDK felt the same way

5. The Unphased Batman Body - I don’t care how good his bat-suit is at absorbing shock, this happened twice in the movie and pulled me out completely, the first time is when Batman goes down with the batpod, Gordon comes out and nabs the Joker but huh? Where did Batman go - he just isn’t there anymore…and what happened to the bike? The second time is at the very end when both Bats and Two Face fall and in total amazement I saw Bats get up and actually run away.

The thing is they tried so hard to make it realistic and yet it made all the unrealistic stuff look even worse. The fact that Joker didn’t kill anyone in the camera’s view (yes I know its PG-13) and that 2 grown men are having a chat on the roof with a guy in a bat-suit, c’mon that is just the silliest thing ever, especially in the context of this “Nolan-verse.” You can’t have it both ways, set the rules and follow them or else teetering back and forth isn’t fair.

In my mind, this was NOT a comic book movie, just like Transformers isn’t a “toy movie.” Other than the fact that it has Batman in it, everything else about the comic was changed - Joker and Two Faces origin specifically - I felt like I was watching a Halloween version of The Untouchables (one of my favorite movies) with Joker as Al Capone and Two Face as Elliot Ness with Batman sprinkled in there to remind you that it is in fact a Batman movie. This is also kind of how many felt about last year’s Transformers movie, why exactly was it called Transformers? Only the names and 1 voice were the same, they should have called it Michael Bay’s Robot Wars instead. At least Batman Begins followed more of the comic story than this one…

Or forget all this and I’m as two-faced as Harvey Dent, I did love it and this might just be nitpicking because of what I was hoping the movie would be. Jack Nicholson, while a bit overweight for the character, brought the “comic book” Joker to life - his performance in the 1989 movie and his plot was pulled right out of the comic. So I guess my problem with The Dark Knight was that it was too far from the source for my taste, and everyone knows I am the furthest thing from a ‘purist’ you will ever find.

To balance it out the 5 things I did love:

1. Bale’s Batman voice: anyone who has a problem with this has never dressed up at Halloween and gone to a party with friends…
2. Two-Face CG face was great and Joker’s make-up, especially when it was running down his face, was amazing.
3. Busting the Scarecrow at the beginning - he did ride off crazy on a horse in the first one.
4. That The Batman is now seen as the villain - which is the way he should have always been. I hate the part when he kicks all the CSI out of the room. Imagine if that happened on The Wire?
5. Rachel Dawes died - someone had to - I was thinking Lucius but it makes sense they killed the girl. But after that whole cellphone craziness at the end, maybe they should have killed him.

Anyways, I’d love to hear from you dear reader - I found it very hard to find any negative remarks about this movie anywhere online - but I’m sure there are some people who feel like me out there? Maybe?

Movie/TV, Batman: WG, Comics