The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

As the Joker himself (not to mention GWF Hegel) would tell us, every force calls forth a force in opposition, inimical but somehow intrinsic to it. And for all the critical praise and the box-office excitement that this film has produced, it was (inevitably) possible, long before its UK release, to read a website devoted to showing exactly why The Dark Knight sucks. I guess it hardly needs saying that it has a plot full of absurdities, a narrative that replaces tension with contrived thrills, that it's little more than a mechanism designed for the duration of 150 minutes (with its metronomic music, repeated attention to clocks and countdowns, and so on) to reassure its target audience that they won't have to wait more than 90 seconds for another explosion - or perhaps that they can allow themselves 90 seconds' intermission before they need to lift their faces from their iPhones, or from their popcorn.

The first thing to say about this disappointing movie is that Heath Ledger really is rather good, cruel and charismatic, funny without campness. Poor chap. But the second thing is that I just don't understand the origin of the idea that it's a film with any moral or allegorical weight at all. I looked back at the Guardian reviews, expecting to find adulation for its darkness and seriousness, but found Peter Bradshaw describing it as "overlong and overhyped but hugely entertaining", and Philip French cautioning us that "whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter".

So why would I have expected anything else? In spite of its visual phantasmagoria, The Dark Knight strikes me as a vacuous film, a film that ducks out of more or less every opportunity for ethical complexity. Consider its conclusion. We spend the entire film being told that Batman is an outsider, a near image of the Joker (this month's Sight and Sound gives us the perplexing, absurd line that "the one key difference" between Batman and the Joker is that the Joker kills people, and Batman doesn't), feared and ostracized by the people of Gotham. We know that this is the allegorical potential of the Batman character: Batman can show us the objective violence inherent in the system of justice, he can show us the personal consequences for those who act on behalf of the good, his treatment can illustrate the way that the polis rejects its own good. But Batman ends this film as a self-imposed and unquestionably good exile, not an outsider. Even if the Gothamites fear him, we don't. The message of this final moment is not that justice and crime are uncomfortably close to one another, that justice somehow requires and fosters its criminals (and again, it's the Joker who tells us this) - rather, that good men like Batman sometimes have to take a rough deal for the greater good. Batman takes one for the team and runs off into the night.

Consider, too, the bloated Harvey Dent sub-plot, which distends the film long beyond its running time, but which seems to have been inserted to suggest moral ambiguity: doesn't Two-Face show us the cruelty, the arbitrariness of justice, the lawman and the criminal as two sides of the same coin? Well, no. It's a plot that comes out of nowhere. There's no suggestion in the first half of the film that Dent is anything other than a blameless moral crusader. The name 'Two-Face' comes only from the corrupt and resentful cops whose force he has cleaned up as District Attorney. And his moral transformation is accompanied by a comic-book physical transformation (as the website above says, it makes him look like half an alien from Mars Attacks!, not a scarred monster. There's nothing complex about this man, and actually nothing ambiguous at all, either. He's a good guy who turns into a bad guy: he's no longer the man he was.

Consider, finally, the prominent role that Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) have in this film. Was there ever a pair of actors who could be chosen to suggest decency, to neutralize any moral ambiguity that Batman's actions might have had?

Even the cityscapes, I came to think, sucked a bit. Nolan says in Sight and Sound that these computer-generated vistas are not just a legitimate resource for a film-maker, but something that a director ought to employ, a technological way of fighting cinema's corner against home entertainment. "It's incumbent on exhibitors but also on film-makers to provide the audience with a reason to leave their homes." And these are spectacular, and in a way I liked the idea that Batman's natural habitat might be not the subterranean Batcave, but the top of the skyscraper: an urban eyrie. But how, if your view of the city is habitually the sweeping panorama, are you going to suggest and portray moral dirtiness and compromise? Even if they're shot at night, these visuals leave us just too far from the streets, marvelling at the spectacle of the city but never seeing it from ground-level, never needing to be afraid of it.

For this film, a C.