I have two reviews for you today, because I had a heavy weekend of cinema-going.

First up: The Dark Knight. LJ users can skip this by not looking behind the cut. Non-LJ users…. Well. I must be the last person to see this movie so I can’t believe spoilers matter.

It was okay. You know. Pretty much meh. I think it has been over-hyped and under-criticised because it was Heath Ledger’s last film and his performance was supposedly fantastic. No one likes to speak ill of the dead.

It was a good performance, but then it wasn’t a superlative one. It wasn’t the high point of Ledger’s career. It wasn’t the equivalent of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, for instance. Everyone knows Ledger could act. I was expecting something original, and the sad fact is that I’ve seen Death Machine.

Let me just take a brief sideways step here: Death Machine is on my list of top ten best movies of all time. I do indeed have a penchant for darkly humorous horror science-fiction, and I consider this to be a prime example. It is, after all, the only film I know to imply a bizarre and tragic accident involving a baby and a garbage disposal unit. One of the characters is called Sam Raimi. It is a rare offering of something dripping with references to the genre and yet doing something that manages to come across as original. It also has a Big Bad in it that’s frankly far more terrifying than bloody Terminator ever was.

In that movie Brad Dourif plays a psychotic genius living in the basement who, despite his lunacy, nearly outsmarts everyone else. Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight was so reminiscent of Dourif’s in Death Machine that I couldn’t watch it without wondering why in the hell Dourif wasn’t playing the part. He did it first. Ledger obviously took some inspiration from Jack Nicholson’s performance as the same character, but that was a tiny veneer on what for me was Jack Dante from top to toe. Also, to me he didn’t look comfortable in the part. He didn’t ever look as though he’d settled into the role. He reminded me of a cat in a box: little bits of him kept poking out.

And let’s just mention Bale’s voice. How irritating was that? Come on guys. We don’t need an anti-hero who sounds like he has a constant case of bad strep throat.

Eric Roberts, obviously so overblown at being offered a job in something Box Office smashworthy for a change, actually did some acting and tried to pull off his part as a Mafia boss, but did about as believable a job as he did playing the Master in Dr Who (I know, I know, you’ve wiped that from your memory, just like Highlander 2). Aaron Eckhart is still Dr Josh Keyes in my head, burrowing through the Earth’s mantle in a metal cigar tube and defying all laws of physics, for which I cannot and will not forgive him. HE’S NOT A DISTRICT ATTORNEY. HE’S A CRAPPY FREAKIN’ SCIENTIST WHO SHOULD BE SUED BY OAKLEY FOR DARING TO UTTER THE WORD ‘UNOBTAINIUM’.

The plot was… Yeah. Come on. Mafia hiring the Joker to kill Batman because there’s a new DA in town? I found it largely implausible and disjointed and the way it was all stitched together managed to put me very close to that feeling of lots of things going on but nothing actually happening. For me that’s the worst sort of film: all data and very little information. There are films that get away with it because they are sticking precisely to a genre template and the fun is in seeing how they’ll play out a well-known story. These are what Frood and I call Mighty Ducks movies. We watched Balls of Fury the other night, which did exactly that and was great. I didn’t have to worry about the story and could get on with admiring Christopher Walken’s lack of shame.

Then there are films that try to tell a story and yet they don’t have enough of it to fill the time the crew has allotted itself and so a substantial amount of the film is padding. The Usual Suspects was just such a film, the Spiderman films are expert at it and, sadly, The Dark Knight.has gone that way too.

Raise your hand if you didn’t figure out what would happen to the sonar database when Morgan Freeman punched in his character’s name at the end. Raise your hand if you didn’t know the crims on the ferry would make the right decision before the decent townsfolk. Raise your hand if you didn’t realise Harvey Dent was going to end up horrifically disfigured and calling himself Twoface. raise your hand if you didn’t figure out that Ramirez was going to be one of the traitors (Hispanic female cop: bound to be on the take. She’s got a family to support ).

Anyone? No? Thought not.

OK, I’ll admit I was surprised by one thing: that they wasted Twoface with less than half a movie’s worth of screentime. Also, if the Joker was, as he claimed, not a strategist but a dog chasing cars (which I found the biggest disappointment of all because the dog chasing cars metaphor told me exactly how the Joker should have been written and wasn’t) then what possessed him to put so much effort into turning Dent into a walking weapon doing what he couldn’t be bothered doing himself?

The film was overly long for what it had to offer and could have done with having a good 45 minutes chopped off its running time to force the writers and directors to be more sparing and more efficient. There is nothing as delightful as an efficiently told story. Especially in the cinema. I don’t know why the fashion these days is for films well over the 2 hour mark. It’s as if the film-makers have forgotten that value for money lies in the quality of the film, not how many minutes we’re paying for. I’d rather have a great film of 90 minutes than a so-so film of 140, especially because I don’t need to worry about needing the loo before the end or my back locking up in protest at having to sit still for too long.

All in all, an okay effort. Bale did a better job as Wayne in this than he did in the first film: he did a better job as Wayne than he did as Batman. Michael Caine showed his usual ability to throw on any old part and make it look accomplished, although it helps if you can imagine Alfred as somehow having survived the battle at Rorke’s Drift. Gary Oldman looked like he was performing at what we in triathlon circles call ‘recovery effort’. Cillian Murphy popped up to make sure we hadn’t forgotten his character and then vanished again; only to turn up wearing a hat near the end, presumably because they’d confiscated his sack. Maggie Gyllenhaal was a bit of a wallflower, in my opinion. She certainly didn’t simper or scream, however she did somewhat fade into the background, which is odd given that the plot hinged on the critical love triangle between her, the golden boy hero and the dark and dangerous anti-hero (and dear gods THAT one has been done to death in the Cyclops-Jean Gray-Wolverine never-ending saga). The ending was just plain ludicrous. I thought Oldman was going to burst into some tragic opera (which might have meant I could hear WTF he was saying).

Plus points: I got one of the tickets for free because I joined the Cameo membership programme and the volume in the Cameo goes all the way up to eleven. There was a motorbike, even if it would have handled like a barge and no, you can’t do those Parkour style wall-jumps ON A FREAKING MOTORBIKE. I left with the warm, comforting glow of knowing that the Marvel flicker-flack at the start of their movies is umpteen times better than the DC version. The sky-hook balloon looked like a jellyfish, which got me thinking about that film with the flying fish and the egg… Actually that’s a bad thing, because I can’t remember what it was called and I’ll spend all day trying to find out.

If you can forget the hype and go with full awareness that it suffers from the malaise common to so many sequels, you should enjoy it. Just don’t believe anyone telling you that it’s better than the first one. It might be closer to DC universe canon, but I think that made the production team just a little bit lazy.