Superheroes are utterly ridiculous. That's all I could think of when a stiff-necked, obscenely-built Batman pops onto the screen in The Dark Knight. What sort of dull pre-adolescent fantasy are we all communally participating in here, and thereby sanctioning, no less? Do we somehow, as a society, feel it's okay to pine for a cape that would allow you to fly, or to dream you could knock out a maniacal killer who wields a gun with just a couple of sturdy, unflinching punches? The sub-orgiastic surges of energy periodically afforded by these movies are too far over the top, and often too cloudy, to capture me in visceral identification. And the bad guys are too magical to have any menace—Heath Ledger's Joker is a spooky and psychological character, to be sure, but his ability to be anywhere at any time, with an army of goons having presently constructed, say, a gargantuan ziggurat of dollar bills (just in time to be torched by your man), or to turn up at a cocktail party with nothing but a Ginsu knife kit, hold everyone in terrified thrall, then slip away (off screen) before the impressively-equipped team of Batman and the Gotham City PD can seem to spot him, leaves me lacking the real sense of doom that would make this kind of story kick.

I want to see a movie about a young cockbite web-dev in Tukwila, WA, with a black Teflon outfit and a firecracker, and his trusty butler who spends his time browsing eBay and listening to police scanners, the two of them facing a tireless, waif-like speed addict with a 4-minute-mile and an air rifle who lives down the street. That would be good cinema.

All this aside, The Dark Knight is not a bad piece of action movie.