The Dark Knight

Bawitdaba! I. Am. Back. Rock steady, and no more dizzies!!! I'm as giddy as a little girl. In a little dress. With little saddle shoes. Little pigtails. And we're back into it with the hit of the summer. The new Batman film! With the Joker!!! OMG!!!! And how good is it? Umm . . .

Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are never given a chance to act. Katie Holmes has been replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Let's just say Maggie is as good an actress as Katie. Two-Face's transformation doesn't make much sense. Christian Bale doesn't do anything special. I've read he got ripped for the role, but you wouldn't know 'cause they never show you the extent of his muscles. Come on, let him take his shirt off. He's on a boat with a ballet troupe (who seem to be more amply proportioned than I would imagine ballerinas are) -- and yet we don't see some action. We've got time for boring talk of showing one's face and true heroes and yada yada yada -- why not time for the ballerinas with Bale's buff bod? Where's the fun? And it looks like they spent some time choreographing the fights, but they're filmed so close-up and darkly and quickly that you can't tell what they're doing.

So what does that leave us with? A bladder-busting 152 minutes of waiting for the Joker to come onscreen and slipping into boredom when he's offscreen. Heath Ledger is good -- maybe great -- but the effect of his performance seems constrained by the PG-13 rating. We never see how he makes the pencil disappear or see the answer to his question, "Why so serious?" Hannibal Lector bit a guy's face off, and we saw that, and it was terrifying. Heath might have been scarier if this were an R film, like it should be. But as it is, he's still plenty creepy. And the scene of him hanging out a police car is classic.

Bottom line: One more movie that goes in the "hour too long" column. A producer or executive or someone should have told the Nolan brothers to take out Two-Face and all the boring dialogue. So much talking, and yet I can't remember a single line. What's wrong with Batman versus just one villain? And what's wrong with making a film enjoyable to watch? Let's be honest. When the movie comes out on DVD, and if we decide to watch it a second time, we're going to watch the Joker scenes and skip the rest.