Philadelphia Weekly

"You either die a hero," more than one character gloomily observes in director Christopher Nolan's chilling, difficult sequel to his 2005 smash Batman Begins, "or you live long enough to become the villain."

It's a troubling notion, but one that feels perfectly at home in this disconcerting, stubbornly adult entertainment. A sprawling three-hour epic squeezed into 152 minutes, The Dark Knight is a backbreakingly ambitious picture, grappling with so many meaty, sophisticated ideas and depressingly timely concerns inside its densely layered, too-breathlessly paced crime saga, you can't quite wrap your head around it all in just one viewing.

The movie may fall shy of greatness, but that's not for lack of trying.

Indeed, The Dark Knight might be our first-ever megabudget summer blockbuster dialectical exercise. The witty, literate screenplay (penned by Nolan and his brother Jonathan) is comprised mainly of philosophical debates among various agents of order and chaos. These chats are punctuated by the curious, often exhilarating spectacle of a depressed billionaire dressed up like a flying rodent, beating the shit out of a psychotic clown.

Batman Begins nimbly rebooted the Caped Crusader's mythology, grounding comic-book flights of fancy in a stripped-down, semirealistic universe, as Christian Bale's beleaguered Bruce Wayne slowly learned to walk the line between justice and vengeance.

The Dark Knight picks up where that flick's rousing final scene left off, with Gary Oldman's endearing, soon-to-be Commissioner Gordon worrying what sort of unexpected ripple effects a costumed vigilante might have on the endlessly adaptable criminal ecosystem.

"Escalation" was Gordon's biggest fear, and it hits Gotham City hard in the form of the Joker.

Devastatingly, this daunting, iconic character turned out to be Heath Ledger's final completed film performance, and he delivers precisely the sort of roiling, balls-to-the-wall freakshow turn from which legends are made.

Just watch the way Ledger shuffles hunchbacked into scene after scene, unsteady on corkscrew legs, incessantly blinking while salaciously running his tongue over scarred, twisted lips. The smeared clown makeup and matted green hair eerily suit his singsong vocal cadences; he sounds like a demented ventriloquist's dummy. Ledger is all bumbling elbows until it's time to kill, which he does (quite often) with swift, balletic precision.

Jack who?

As in all the best Batman stories, The Dark Knight boils down to an ideological battle between Bruce Wayne and the Joker. The former thinks the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, while the latter will kill and maim and do anything imaginable to prove otherwise. The Joker is such a formidable villain because he isn't looking for anything banal like money, power or even world domination--he just wants to drag the good guys down to his level and prove he was right about us all along.

Their battle of wills winds up centering upon idealistic, uncorruptible district attorney Harvey Dent (a fine Aaron Eckhart), the upright White Knight to Batman's shadowy vigilante. Dent's goody-two-shoes, no-nonsense approach to law enforcement stirs something deep inside even cagey, ethically gray folks like Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon, so the Joker's inevitable attacks aren't just personal--they're political statements.

The Dark Knight is preoccupied, as most of us have been for the past seven years, with unsettling questions about how far we must go to combat an inexplicable enemy. (Michael Caine's lovingly played Alfred the Butler notes: "Some men just want to watch the world burn.") Batman practices his own unique form of extraordinary rendition, and a disturbingly up-to-the-minute FISA subplot finds Morgan Freeman's sly Q-ish character tendering his resignation in disgust.

So much to chew on here. Too much, really. Nolan's restless camera tends to circle every scene in sinuous 360-degree tracking shots, as that numbingly repetitive Hans Zimmer score keeps hitting harder and louder. The editor bails out of so many key moments so fast, before the dialogue has had any time to sink in. The Dark Knight is too propulsive and aggressive a piece of filmmaking for its own good.

But it's also an exceptionally thoughtful, strikingly well-written and weirdly curtailed movie that's just about one half-hour of patience and breathing room away from the masterpiece it's so desperately yearning to be.

And some of these images will live long in my nightmares.