This may be hard to believe, but I don’t go into a theater before watching a blockbuster movie with the expectation that it’ll be overhyped and bloated; that’s just how it turns out from time to time. No, I have reasonable expectations just like the next guy.

As I check out the reactions to The Dark Knight from esteemed critics and normal people alike, I notice a common thread – everyone likes the movie. A lot. Particularly, everyone seems enamored of Heath Ledger’s unhinged, magnificent, and terrifying performance as The Joker. Straight out, I want to make clear that I completely agree. Ledger isn’t just some ham acting out in a clown costume; we had Jack Nicholson do that already, nearly twenty years ago. Ledger commands the screen not with an over-the-top performance but a scene-stealing, subtle one. His makeup masks not only a despicable demon who hurts for the sake of causing pain but also a troubled, carefully shaded character worthy of Shakespeare’s finest plays.

Let’s first get to what I didn’t like. Many of the main roles are miscast, sometimes badly so. Christian Bale returns as the Caped Crusader, but if anything his performance is more wooden than in the movie’s predecessor, Batman Begins. See, I’ve always thought the complex Batman character should be someone who’s consumed by inner demons, one who even when unmasked reveals only some layers while hinting at much greater depths. And I never get that impression with Bale as Batman: He is what you see, and little more. Yes, we know he’s got this secret identity thing going, and he doesn’t tell people everything, and that’s nice. Endearing, even. But Bale’s inadequacies as an actor show up in spades here, because I never get the feeling that there’s more than meets the eye. Bale’s Batman doesn’t feel like he’s consumed by demons in the least; he seems like a pretty boy with a lot of money who likes to torture (yes, torture) and kill bad guys without any of the blame or acclaim.

Moving along, we have a new Rachel Dawes, aka The Love Interest, played this time by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’s a monumental improvement over the terrible performance that Katie Holmes gave in Batman Begins. Even so, as has been noted elsewhere, Gyllenhaal is too intelligent, her eyes too ironically knowing, to play the role. In other words, she seems out of place because she’s smarter than Rachel Dawes – an assistant DA – is. (Of course, we don’t see much of Rachel doing DA stuff; we see her running from place to place in a panic, or professing her love for Harvey Dent through nonverbal ways, or smiling coquettishly.) So: Like the Maggie Gyllenhaal, a LOT, but she was far better than her character was written. Someday they’ll get it right.

And then there’s the third wheel to the love triangle: Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart. Now, you have to set aside Tommy Lee Jones’s performance as Dent in one of the earlier Batman movies, because this is a new Bativerse, and it’s like those other movies never happened. Dent eventually becomes the physically and mentally scarred Two-Face, but Eckhart can’t quite handle the heavy lifting that the complicated character demands. When you see Eckhart, you think of likable cad, the slightly slimy guy who’s better than the real hero at basically everything. But in a charming way. Here, Dent’s a noble crusader, the district attorney who’s going to clean up Gotham, but Eckhart is just another toothy, slick, Ken doll who’s there just to look good. The way Eckhart plays Dent, you’d think he was just an affable fellow who wants to do the right thing; as with Bruce Wayne, there doesn’t seem to be any undercurrent of ulterior motives, nothing to see here, please disperse. Eckhart, despite having studied split personalities in preparing for the role, is clearly in way over his head here.

The movie itself is overlong, even bloated. It seems the in thing nowadays to have a movie end several times – you know, to keep the Great Unwashed on their toes. Oh my goodness! It’s not over yet! What will happen next? But surely there’s a way to do this without producing a film that’s two and a half hours long. If you’re going to make a movie that long, be my guest, but the movie should be more than our heroes running from action scene to action scene, particularly when nearly all of those action scenes are in dark, dank Gotham City.

The bottom line is that if it weren’t for Heath Ledger’s award-caliber performance, this wouldn’t be much of a movie at all. It’s long, overproduced, overplotted, and miscast in key roles. Ledger acts the proverbial rings around Bale, who doesn’t act so much as react and glower. Oh, and here’s an imponderable for you – how come Bruce Wayne’s voice and Batman’s voice sound so different from each other? It’s not as if Batman’s mouth is covered by his mask; it’s completely unobscured. So why does he sound all throaty, raspy, and clogged when he’s Batman? Does he have a voice synthesizer in his mouth? File that under Idontgetit.

But here are some positives, to make sure all bases are covered. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine exude effortless efficiency as Lucius and Alfred, respectively, doing far more for the movie than it for them. Both act as Bruce’s conscience, and both roles were written as to be completely believable. Professionalism is always a plus when casting superhero movies. And some of those vaunted action scenes are a lot of fun to watch, although many of them seem to involve Batman jumping off a building, Batman climbing down the side of a building, or Batman throwing someone else off a building. In the dark. Because it’s supposed to be gloomy ol’ Gotham.

So for me, The Dark Knight was a disappointment. It’s not a bad little film, but it felt too loose, as if writers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan had decided on an ending and then threw everything they could think of into the plot to reach that goal. This happens to a lot of middling action films – the hero races to point A, escapes certain death, races to point B, escapes certain death, repeat ad infinitum. Same sort of thing here, only we don’t even get clever plotting that we might expect from what’s purportedly a higher grade of superhero movie. There’s much chaos in The Dark Knight, but ultimately the maelstrom of disorder consumes, rather than engages, the viewer. The Dark Knight is elegy to the great potential – realized and unrealized – that’s forever lost with the death of Heath Ledger.

**1/2