No Country for Batman

From Huffpost:

It would be hard for a movie to enter theaters with more buzz to live up to than The Dark Knight. Critical raves were near-unanimous, crystallizing around praise for the haunted last performance of Heath Ledger, which more than a few whispered was so unsettlingly brilliant that it may have driven him over the edge. All this for a summer blow-em-up blockbuster? How could it satisfy the hype?

As it turns out, it’s closer to the bleak Westerns that cleaned up at the Oscars this winter than to the candy-colored creampuffs that we’re used to seeing in July, a bleak cry of despair cloaked in the garb of a comic book action movie, No Country For Old Men with a Batmobile.

The movie starts out innocently enough, with a violently funny Joker-led bank heist, in which each of the Joker’s henchman shoots the next one in turn in order to get a better share of the loot, with the Joker pulling the final trigger. From there the film cuts to Batman (Christian Bale), picking up where the last film left off, successfully thwarting the Scarecrow. But the clash between good and evil quickly gives way to destruction and collateral damage, as Ledger’s Joker casts his violence as a proof of the basic amorality of humanity, each death a random choice, with each collateral casualty yet more evidence that he’s right.