Things have been shaken up in Gotham since the coming of the masked vigilante known as the Batman (Bale). The new D.A., Harvey Dent (Eckhart), is set to bring down the mob boss Sal Maroni (Roberts), who has taken over from Boss Falconi (last seen in Batman Begins). Ordinary citizens are inspired by the example of the Batman, just not always in the ways that Batman/Bruce Wayne intended. In fact, not at all in the way that Bruce Wayne/Batman intended. Never in the history of comic-book cinema has the term "hockey pads" been so freighted with irony and menace.

Not all the shakeups in Gotham are good. If, indeed, the Batman is changing things for the better, doesn't that imply that the bad guys are going to rise to meet the challenge presented by a guy who dresses up like a bat? The mob crooks are getting creative with how they handle and hide and launder their money, and the Joker wants in on the deal.

But is that all the Joker wants? Is there something grander he's after, beyond a sizable cut of the mob's money? And is a psychopathic guy who dresses up like a playing card the kind of criminal Gotham can expect to deal with, now that it has a superhero for a protector?

Enough plot for two Batman movies

There are no super-high-tech elevated trains in The Dark Knight, as there were in Batman Begins. This may seem like a quibble, but it really does bespeak the larger issues worming under the surface of the The Dark Knight. Batman Begins, the movie that defined the reality of The Dark Knight and that set the standard for "real"-feeling comic-book movies, had a few comic-bookish conceits, like those super-high-tech trains, Ra's al Ghul's "League of Shadows" and the Scarecrow's "fear toxin." There had to be a few chinks in the armor of the reality presented in Batman Begins to accommodate not only the Batman himself, but the effect he'd have on Gotham society. There's nothing at all stylized in The Dark Knight, like the Blade Runner-ish Narrows of Batman Begins, which is a gaffe, because the Batman is himself a stylized creation. Christopher Nolan did an amazing job making Batman real. But in The Dark Knight, things are a little too real for the movie's own good.

Example? There's a lot of rhetoric chucked around about Hope and Heroism in The Dark Knight, just as there was in Batman Begins about Justice. In a slightly tweaked reality like that of Begins, platitudes make a certain amount of sense. A fuzzy reality can accommodate intangible ideals. The themes of The Dark Knight are clubbed over the audience's head, but in the new tableaux that Nolan has created, they flop on the same level as talk-show punditry and political slogans—too fake and airy to work in the context of the new, tougher, more real reality of The Dark Knight, which tackles the moral crises that threaten to hamstring us in a post-9/11 world. There's a visual quote of Ground Zero, in case anyone missed the point. One hugely important scene involving a plot by the Joker to kill some innocents and not-so-innocents comes across like a filmed position paper, not a bona-fide moment of suspense.

These themes are supposed to backbone The Dark Knight, and in Nolan's "more real" reality they're not allowed to do their job, which is to hold together the five or six plots of The Dark Knight, any one of which would have made for a perfectly fine Batman movie. The Dark Knight is dense for a summer movie, and any of the several climaxes would be a great payoff for any lesser action flick. The movie, at two and a half hours, feels chainsawed down from a much longer movie. The first few acts are choppy, and a clever editor could have probably made two Batman movies out of this flick without raising a sweat.

All of what I've written above might make it seem as though I'm bashing The Dark Knight, which I'm not. When was the last time a summer movie had too much plot? Or had too much emphasis on theme? It's a great movie ... and the faults I'm talking about consequently stick out like freshly hammered thumbs. The fact is, there's no way this movie could fully live up to the fans' expectations, and maybe no way for Nolan to live up to his own ambitions. The plot has truly surprising, "holy-crud-I-can't-believe-they-went-there" serpenty twists, and Nolan and his co-screenwriters take dramatic risks that hit like buckshot in the throat. There is a chase scene that ought to be taught in film schools—it's sort of quiet, and becomes creepy, not Bond-like, because of that. It's not full of sound and fury, because it signifies something. Believe the hype about Ledger's Joker; he's barely able to contain his own glee and genius for evil. He's frightening and funny and poisoned with his own brilliance. There's incredible editing and camera work, and kick-ass comic-book action mashed into scenes that feel as if they belong in an extended version of Michael Mann's Heat.

Despite all it faults, and there are many, The Dark Knight is a benchmark comic-book movie, dense as a few classic Batman graphic novels, like The Long Halloween and The Dark Knight Returns. Just can't figure out what they'll do for the third movie.