The Dark Knight is not a great film. Contrary to the hype - hysteria, even - that has surrounded it, it is instead simply a frustrating, absorbing, and at times brilliant comic book movie. Does it deserve the kind words my short review gave it? Yes, but only just. There are certain elements of the film that border on genius. Heath Ledger as the joker in particular is one of the most mesmerising and captivating villains of recent memory. His role will go down in cinematic histories as ‘defining’, and will no doubt win him a posthumous Oscar. This performance, and the sometimes intimidating scope and scale of the film, mean that one has to look hard to find the cracks that lie beneath the surface, but there are certainly cracks.

The film is not called Batman, but The Dark Knight, which immediately gives the audience some idea of what direction the film is going - and, specifically, gives us an idea as to one of its defining features: its tone. The film first and foremost attempts to be ‘dark’, violent, depressing and very serious. The tone is thus one that essentially belongs to its gangster world and the gangster epic genre it often apes, creating an atmosphere of doom that fills the picture. Indeed, ‘serious’ is a word that is intertwined within and mentioned throughout the film: it is the Joker’s catchphrase, and the film’s tagline. However, this seriousness, this lack of humour, both helps and hinders the film, through performance, style, and tone, and is something that is worthy of debate.

This idea of ‘film blanc’ does not so much turn the noir tradition on its head, but gives it an extra dimension. The dark, secluded, secret, world that Bruce Wayne lives in throughout Batman Begins is blown wide open in The Dark Knight, as he is thrust into the social and media spotlight by the Joker. This ‘film blanc’ works by using the now-modern, shiny metropolis of Gotham to show Bruce Wayne and his world in a more ‘realist’ light, in an attempt to propel the film into our world. This helps the film feel more immediate and authentic than its predecessor, and is never more obvious than when Bruce Wayne visits Hong Kong, which in fact contrasts far less with this film’s Gotham than it would have with the previous film’s vision of the city. Tonally this is key, by pushing Gotham and the film’s story into a more recognisable world, the potentially more mythic, or even silly, elements of the film’s comic book world are either nonexistent, or look out of place.

This imbalance is also apparent when the Joker is on screen. His character is so powerful that his performance virtually dictates our responses to the film. This has everything to do with the tone of the character as well. Leaving aside Ledger’s performance, the character is a scary, unpredictable monster who seems to belong in a horror film’s world, not that of a 12A blockbuster. The Joker manages to be both frightening and funny, and he brings a much-needed sense of playfulness to the film, even while it is simultaneously justified by his psychotic, dangerous persona. The humour he creates is uncomfortable precisely because he is so charismatic that we are made to root for him despite his being the villain of the piece. Of course, added to this is the increasing myth of Ledger’s performance, which hangs over the film throughout: part of us roots for the Joker because the Joker is Ledger. This, again, does not help the tone of the film. It is not unusual to have a charismatic villain (indeed Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Burton’s Batman [1989] is another example), but to give such a splendid and colourful one so much screen time that he overpowers the increasingly impassive Batman makes for a rather uneven film.

The seriousness of the film’s tone, and of Batman himself, and the uneasy balance that these things create with the film’s comic book roots and its new villain, are what makes The Dark Knight such a frustrating film. While it is full of greatness, it can never commit to being the gangster epic that it sorely wants to be, and also falls short of becoming anything else that might have made it feel more coherent.