5. The Dark Knight (2008)
Thats two strikes for Nolan. Everyone who worships at the temple of Nolan should just line up for their sucker cards now. I dont remember if I saw this in theaters, which I suppose speaks to how little I care about the film. When it first came out, everyone that I talked to kept saying the same thing, It was dark. It was realistic. Everyone said this like darkness and realism were positive adjectives that made the film inherently superior to every other iteration of Batman. Lets get this out of the way: I can get darkness and realism on the 9o clock news. Since when did it become a triumph of filmmaking to make me believe that a billionaire really could dress up like a human bat and parade around the city? This is based on a comic book. Check your misplaced desire for realism at the door. The voice: Oh, the voice. How I loathed it. Batman sounded barely coherent. Every Bruce Wayne sequence should have been spent in an earnest search for a throat lozenge. The best Batman voice work will forever belong to Kevin Conroy. Im not going to touch the Joker argument. I just googled it and somebody had a forum going of which Joker would win in hand-to-hand combat. This is the point where we take a deep breath and repeat, Its just a movie. Harvey Dent was cartoonish. Seriously. In a movie that was going for realism, they completely lost me here. In the comic books, Dent takes sulfuric acid (vitriol) to the face. The CGI burn job that they did on Eckharts face had me longing for Tommy Lee Jones purple, pimpled Two Face from
Batman Forever.