Let me say right off the, um... well... that The Dark Knight is unlike any Batman film we've seen thus far. True, I said the very same thing of 2005's phenomenal Batman Begins, but it's doubly true this time around, and it's not a good thing on all fronts. I've been heard saying, over the past few weeks, that I expected The Dark Knight to be the best film of 2008, and I will readily admit defeat on that front in the very first paragraph. I was wrong, people. Way wrong.

For starters, this one spends quite a bit of time finding a direction. While the audience was gradually (and successfully) lowered into the fire three years ago when Batman began, the new film shoves us into the fray with both hands, preparation be damned. There's something to be said for beginning a film with a battle scene (see Star Wars: Episode IV for a successful example), but Batman's first action sequence of the movie had neither beginning, middle, nor end. I expected far more from the first fifteen minutes, and when I didn't get it, the scariest thought of all occurred to me: that maybe it wasn't going to be the spectacular end-all for Summer 2008 that we'd hoped.

The overall story arc can only be described as convoluted. If you take into account the borderline absurd conflict in the previous film (in which noxious gases were released onto the population in open, outdoor areas) and consider that it still worked, you'd think they could pull off a Chinese company hiding something from Wayne Enterprises in the midst of a business deal. But they can't -- and in fact, a good majority of the first hour simply didn't need to exist. That creates a nice segue into an adjacent complaint: the movie was simply too long. You could probably make one and a half films out of The Dark Knight, they had so much going on at once, and too many of the plot points are either borderline confusing or deletable altogether.

The Bruce Wayne character made absolutely no progress here; he's almost a cardboard cut-out this time around. Batman himself was more criminal investigator than action crime-fighter, and his close associations with some members of the Gotham police force made him far too human. After all, Batman's foggy mystique is what gives him his fearsome presence in the first place, and putting him in a well-lit room side-by-side with beat cops turns him into something far more pedestrian. These few CSI-style scenes render his elaborate costume an elephant in the room; it just isn't the Batman we know, and as such, it isn't going to go down well with a lot of viewers.

As expected, Heath Ledger is the real story; he delivers phenomenally as the unhinged criminal mastermind who needs no introduction. The nuances with which this Joker is presented will forever overshadow any other incarnation of the character we've ever seen. Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal are always reliable, but the script presents them mostly as observers to their own fate, at least up to a point. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine bring to the table their own solid performances, or at least as solid as they're allowed to be, no more than they're given to do.

Absolutely the best thing about The Dark Knight, without question, is the way in which the Joker lays seige to Gotham City. It's a slowly-simmering unfolding of a genius plot point that must be experienced in-theater and can't be explained or reviewed. The audience realizes, after a certain point, that the city no longer belongs to Batman, the police, or the common thugs we knew in the last film -- it belongs solely to the Joker. And that, let me tell you, is exquisitely terrifying. For all its shortcomings, you simply must see The Dark Knight in order to witness the complete and utter waste and mayhem the Clown Prince of Crime inflicts on Gotham.

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