Gotham City, and a violent bank robbery is carried out with the leader of the gang, a crazed scarred psychopath known as The Joker, turning on the other members and killing them all. The success of Batman against the city’s criminals has spawned similar vigilantes wearing lookalike costumes, and the real crimefighter has to intervene when a similarly-clad group get involved in a major drug deal. Bruce Wayne, the billionaire industrialist who is the real identity of Batman, finds that the woman he loves, Rachel Dawes, is now the girlfriend of Harvey Dent, a District Attorney who is waging a severe campaign against organised crime, targeting the empire headed up by mob boss Sal Maroni. When Oriental businessman Lau retreats to Hong Kong with most of the Mob’s money, Batman follows and performs a daring abduction of the corrupt businessman, delivering him back to Lieutenant Jim Gordon in Gotham. The Joker offers to work with Maroni, and launches a campaign against Gotham’s law and order authorities, managing to kill Police Commissioner Loeb and Prosecutor Judge Surrillo, with Mayor Garcia being the next on his list, The Joker using the TV news networks to taunt both Batman and Dent. An assassination attempt is made on the Mayor during a Police parade, and Jim Gordon is killed. The Joker threatens to wage war against the entire populace of the city unless Batman reveals his identity and turns himself over to the Police, causing Harvey Dent to call a press conference and announce to the world that he is Batman, his reckoning being that the Joker will make an attempt on his life to allow the real Batman to arrest him. The Joker launches an attack on the convoy taking Dent to prison, causing a trail of destruction through the city as eighteen-wheelers smash into Police cars and vans, but Batman manages to stop the assault, finally facing off against The Joker and, with the aid of Jim Gordon, who faked his own death, manages to apprehend him. After The Joker escapes, taking businessman Lau, who knows where the Mob’s money is, with him, Batman and Gordon realise that he allowed himself to be captured in order to be jailed along with Lau. Having kidnapped both Rachel and Dent, with the aid of corrupt cops, he sets them up in two different locations, each rigged to a boobytrap, telling Batman he must choose who to rescue, but while Batman is in time to save Dent, even though he is horribly disfigured by flames, the Gotham Police are too late to save Rachel, and she dies in a colossal explosion. With Dent in hospital, and Bruce Wayne unable to cope with how he feels about causing Rachel’s death, The Joker announces that he is to strike at the populace of Gotham, with the bombing of a hospital being his first target, and rigging two passenger ferries with explosives, causing Batman to realise he will have to do everything in his powers to stop him, but Dent has escaped from hospital, and is carrying out his own crazed campaign of vigilantism as the hideously scarred Two-Face.... After the remarkable revitalisation of the caped crusader in the excellent Batman Begins (2005), Christopher Nolan extends the saga of the conflicted costumed vigilante yet further, into a film of quite stunning set-pieces, excellent performances and an intelligent script, written by Nolan with his brother Jonathan, although many of the film’s strengths are inevitably pushed to the back due to the death of Heath Ledger, whose version of The Joker, all streaked make-up and a lizard-like flicking tongue, is a truly striking performance, even if or perhaps because so little is actually known about the real man, he very literally being an embodiment of madness. Where Tim Burton’s version of Batman took it into the dark and Gothic, before Joel Schumaker tipped the series into camp and a premature end to the franchise, Nolan sets his film in a very real city, Chicago exteriors standing in for Gotham, and, Batman’s technology and equipment aside, is totally contemporary, with The Joker being a real maniac rather than some sort of DC Comics / Marvel supervillain. The Nolans write good roles for their actors, with Bale managing to personify the duality of Wayne / Batman, although the Clint Eastwood bark he adopts as the latter is a miscalculation, but Aaron Eckhart is well cast as the idealistic Dent, only to himself suffer a case of duality and becomes the gruesomely disfigured Two-Face, and with rather more realistic and disturbing make-up than Tommy Lee Jones’ kitsch blancmange-faced turn in Batman Forever (1995). Running over two and a half hours, but compelling throughout, it seems that Nolan has had to curtail some of themes, with a brief appearance by Batman Begins villain the Scarecrow in the early scenes being unresolved, the character simply vanishing and not being referred to again, and unlike the previous films Batman actually leaves Gotham City for a Hong Kong set-piece which is terrifically staged and shot. What Nolan is not afraid of doing is actually surprising the audience, so the death of Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal stepping in for the non-returning Katie Holmes) comes as a true shock, as well as being the trigger for the final mania of both Batman and Dent. Although brutally violent, and it is truly surprising that this carries a 12A rating, since the ‘fantasy violence’ element which is often cited by the BBFC as justification is hardly applicable here, there is actually virtually no bloodshed, although the scene of The Joker ruthlessly dispensing of a thug with a pencil under the aegis of a magic trick would have been cut by the BBFC for an 18 only a few years ago due to their old justification of ‘imitability’. Shot by Nolan’s usual DoP Wally Pfister, the film looks superb, with the courage to stage major set-pieces at night but not using darkness to hide deficiencies or lack of budget, the quite brilliant convoy chase, involving cars, vans, articulated lorries, a helicopter and Batman’s latest toy, the terrifically designed Batbike, being fantastically staged and delivered with real impact. The screenplay delivers a lot of clever ideas, not all of which are fully developed, although a standout is the story by butler Alfred (Michael Caine at his restrained best) about chasing a bandit during his Army days in Burma, and to what they eventually resorted to capture him, a clever analogy and interestingly one that does not pander to the audience by explaining the Burma references. You either understand or you don’t. After some breathtaking action sequences, Nolan’s film threatens to become anti-climatic after a final face-off with the main nemesis, helped by another hi-tech wall of gadgetry by Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, set in front of a wall of glowing mini-monitors for the only noticeably dodgy CGI in the entire film), for a less spectacular confrontation with Dent / Two-Face, but Nolan manages to carry off this more intimate clash with the same panache and effect. Long, brutal and definitely dark, the final puts Batman’s status in yet more peril, as the city seems to finally turn against him, the Batsign smashed, once again leaving him fighting against crime and violence in a city which seems to need and fear him in equal proportions. Crammed with an abundance of ideas, so much so that some have got lost across the way, Nolan, as the box-office has shown, has made a landmark superhero film, and an often astounding piece of popular but intelligent cinema.