Nolan's dark, almost forbidding concept renders The Dark Knight not far short of the horror-thriller movie which its comic book antecedents couldn't quite sustain. It bludgeons us half to death with its bleak view of the world before tacking on a slightly-feel-better ending as Batman (Christian Bale) speeds off to continue his attempt to clean up corrupt and fearful Gotham City.
His fight, of course, is with Heath Ledger's The Joker, now a psychopath of whom it is said, "some men just want to see the world burn". In the end, the way both men are characterised makes their battle seem like that of two nutters in mortal combat. Dramatically speaking, Ledger, in his last finished performance, wins hands down largely because he is allowed to. It is not a piece of acting that develops much and is almost on one note throughout, but that note, eschewing the slightest bit of Jack Nicholson's spiteful irony, is pretty formidable.
This Joker claims to have been ruined by the bullying father he hated and has a ravaged mouth for which he gives gruesome but contradictory explanations, constantly using what remains of his tongue to wet his lips.
Ledger gives us a tortured soul with a tortured body and a terrorist's determinationto spread anarchy around Gotham at any cost to innocent human lives. It is not a pretty sight, but Anthony Hopkins, as our favourite flesh-eating friend, did even more by doing less and there was once a chap called Bela Lugosi who frightened me as much with just a look. Will Ledger get a posthumous Oscar? He would certainly be worth a nomination.
As for Bale's billionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne, with his butler and helpmate (Michael Caine), his Batmobiles and his bevy of admiring women, there seems no good reason why he should want to become Batman except another troubled childhood and the nagging of a conscience that recognises Gotham as something like purgatory for those less lucky than himself.
His efforts to relieve fellow citizens of the crooks who have battened upon them, though largely successful, have left the gate wide open for the Joker, and himself as a hero that not everyone admires.
Bale, subject of unwelcome publicity this week after being arrested for alleged assault of his mother and sister, reprises the part well enough, but it is Ledger's performance one notices more, probably because it is so much more fun to be given the shivers by evil than to relish even the flawed good.
The story progresses down its studiously downbeat path, marked by the usual passages of technically proficient crash, bang, wallop (mostly well done but a little familiar by now). So we watch the mounting chaos as a young and Kennedy-like district attorney (Aaron Eckhart) has his face made into a grotesque piece of pulp by the Joker, and as Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a choice between him and Bruce in the penultimate reel.
There is also Gary Oldman as honest police lieutenant Jim Gordon and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox. But it is the duel between Bruce and the Joker that holds the attention between the bleak Gotham City panoramas and the frantic chases.
You'll be impressed, even if a leavening of humour might profitably have pierced the gloom of it all.
And there is also the matter of the film's length. Buñuel once sagely said that if you want to make a really good film you have to cut out a lot that you like as well as stuff that doesn't work. Nolan might have taken that advice.
The first hour, in which the story is set up, is really the culprit. But there are also times when Nolan seems to be luxuriating in his expert cast, his intelligent screenplay and his spectacular effects and not thinking enough about the sharper editing that would have driven the film along.
Even so, The Dark Knight, looking as it does at a mad, bad world and some insane people trying to get the better of it, is an audacious attempt to point a few morals for today with a comic book nightmare we've never before taken so seriously, even in Nolan's own Batman Begins. When this one works, it undoubtedly works well and sets new standards for summer blockbusters.
Though the doubts remain.
