Finally saw The Dark Knight over the weekend. I was... disappointed. The film is so hugely popular, with an almost universally positive critical reaction, that I was expecting better. At two and a half hours the movie is waaaaaay toooo loooong and tends to be dull whenever the Joker isn't on the screen. Also, it's kinda racist. (Come on, I can't be the only person who noticed that Gotham's criminal underworld is way more racially diverse than Gotham's regular overworld.)

The movie has been called (in both the positive and the rare negative reviews) "dark" and "grim" and "sadistic" and "perverse" and other things suggesting a grisly horror-movie intensity. But mostly I just found it emotionally uninvolving. It's very talky, for an action movie, and most of what people have to say is kind of stupid.It sort of meanders along and some of the individual scenes work, but they don't add up to a satisfying whole.

The critical consensus is right about one thing: Heath Ledger's post-punk take on the Joker is the highlight of the film. It's all gimmick: a bizarre constricted wreck of a voice, a reptilan lip-licking tic, strange feral body movements, and it all ends up working perfectly to suggest completely deranged genius.Still, the movie lets him down: he gives a full-body performance as the Joker, but the movie is all quick-cuts to isolated body parts. (People, Flashdance was more than twenty years ago, can't we get over it yet?)

The Joker is meant to be a figure of pure, disorienting chaos, and some of the early scenes with him have a frightening, mesmerizing quality -- frightening because you have no idea what the character is going to do, what he's actually capable of. But that tension eventually drains away as you realize: the only thing he's ever actually going to do is blow stuff up.

This movie is lousy with stuff blowing up. But -- in order to avoid an R rating? -- nothing else of consequence seems to happen. Oh, except when Harvey Dent's face catches on fire, which is a side-effect of something blowing up, so I don't think it counts as "else." In the script, the Joker says that he "likes to use knives" instead of guns, and, in a rare and welcome touch of humor, when he's arrested his pockets are described as full of "nothing but knives and lint." But then we never actually see him use a knife on anyone.

This is the Joker, people! We should see him kill people in numerous ingenious ways! We should see him mess with people's minds! The Joker's stunts should be brutal, but they should also be darkly funny. His dialogue has some nice touches of odd humor -- the way every time he tells someone the story of how he got his facial scars, he tells a completely different story, for example -- but his stunts don't.

Oh, yeah, another flaw: this movie has a serious humor deficit. It's like somebody involved in the scriptwriting kept cracking a whip and saying, "Make it grimmer! Grimmer, I tell you! Wait, that line, somebody might chuckle at that line, that line must go! No laughs! We are making Serious Drama, here, people!"

In a movie where the Joker is chief villain, that is simply inexcusable.

Not only are the Joker's stunts insufficiently humorous, but they seem kind of random, as storytelling. There's no sense of escalating stakes or rising tension, and the emotional climax actually happens about halfway through, leaving most of the movie as dreary falling action. So then there's a second climax, a variation on the classic prisoner's dilemma, with ferries that might blow up, which ends up being almost completely uninvolving because 1. We are tired of stuff maybe blowing up at this point, and 2. We don't know anything about any of the people on either ferry. The movie is two and a half hours long, surely they could have spent a little time working some additional characters into the story.

Finally, the ethical dilemmas and contrasts in the movie ended up being unconvincing and rather tedious. People spend a lot of time saying sentences that contain words like, "vigilante, outside the law, needs a hero, the best of us" but they don't really add up to anything. It's conversation about a topic substituting for a story about a topic.

For example, in the last couple of scenes, the movie seems to come down firmly on the side of lying to people. But it doesn't do this by showing how, ironically, lying to people can make for a better world. Instead it has characters talking. Batman says, "we should lie to people about what really happened, so that they can continue to believe in this thing we imagine they believe in which is for some reason better than this other thing they could believe in," and Commissioner Gordon says, "yes, yes, by all means, you're absolutely right." And then he explains it to his kid, just to make sure we get it. And then everybody stares moodily into the distance. So, uh... maybe that is the irony, maybe we're supposed to think that Batman is being an idiot. But it doesn't come across that way.

I guess I didn't hate it completely -- I mean, it is a darn sight better than Batman & Robin, which made me want to claw my own eyes out of my head -- but it did nothing to restore my faith in the action-adventure blockbuster.