Erased

This not-so-thrilling espionage thriller begins, like half the thrillers these days, with a bank robbery. The scene shifts from a safe deposit box in Belgium to the global affairs department at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It is never clear what one thing has to do with the other, and it is even foggier what Erased has to do with anything else.

In this daffy generic rip-off of the Jason Bourne franchise cross-pollinated with the daughter-in-peril plot from Taken, Aaron Eckhart plays Ben Logan, an ex-CIA agent who used to be a trained assassin, now starting a new life as an expatriate in Antwerp, working for a multinational corporation that specializes in high-tech security (don’t they all?). He is also saddled with an estranged 15-year-old daughter to raise. Precocious and sassy, Amy (Liana Liberato) has come to live with him. Oblivious to the demands of fatherhood and distracted by his job and his endless supply of technological toys, he barely has time to feed her anything but cookies, which send her to the hospital due to a peanut allergy. Then, with no advance warning, his company vanishes into thin air, the office disappears, the phone numbers are invalid, the bank accounts are closed and there is no record of his employment. At the morgue, he finds all of his co-workers in body bags. Meanwhile, Ben and his daughter Amy go on the lam, hunted down by the men who ran the fake company, which turns out to have been a cover-up for the shipment of American-made weapons of mass destruction to ... Mozambique.  Huh?  It gets dopier.

As long as Ben is the only member of the phony corporation still alive, the killers will stop at nothing to ice him. An ex-lover and rogue CIA operative named Anna (Olga Kurylenko, the catatonic wife in Terrence Malick’s valium overdose To The Wonder) arrives to inform Ben that the same people he used to work for in the CIA are tracking him too. Father and daughter, now fugitives, are chased through a hospital by a killer who pumps bullets into the patients in the intensive care unit. I never cease to be amazed how Americans who don’t speak the local language have no problem calling the U.S. using complicated telephone dialing codes on cellphones in foreign countries. But even though he has no job, no money, no country, no passport, and unless he thinks fast, no more daughter, he outsmarts everyone at every move, destroying most of Antwerp while maintaining a straight face through dialogue like “I’ll never forget the first day you showed up in Somalia—ready to set the world on fire.”

Nothing in Erased makes much sense. What do the gunrunners want? Why do they need to erase Ben? Why do they kidnap Amy? How can she avoid peanuts if she’s blindfolded? German music video director Philipp Stölzl and writer Arash Amel must have something in mind. “We’re cast from the same cloth—we know what we want and how to get it,” says one of the gunrunners. But nobody lets the rest of us in on it. We don’t know what anybody wants. All we know is that the only sure way to avoid the loss of any more I.Q. points in the world today is to stay away from movies like Erased.  

rreed@observer.com

 ERASED

WRITTEN BY Arash Amel

DIRECTED BY Philipp Stölzl

STARRING Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato and Olga Kurylenko

RUNNING TIME: 100 mins.

RATING: 1/4 Stars

Gerard Butler, sandwiched between producer Alan Siegel and director Antoine Fuqua. (PMc)

On Monday evening, Gerard Butler stood outside The Darby, waving around a cigarette animatedly, flanked by a model on either side. His gesticulations punctuated his excited rant on why these ladies--who were already at the Cinema Society after-party for his latest film, Olympus Has Fallen--should actually try to see it.

"It's not JUST an action film," said Mr. Butler, which is true. It's technically an action thriller, with the following premise:

Agent Mike Banning (Butler) is a Secret Service agent assigned to Presidential Detail. After a tragic accident, he is demoted and assigned to desk duty. When the White House (Secret Service Code: "Olympus") is captured by a terrorist mastermind and the President (Aaron Eckhart) is held hostage, Banning finds himself trapped within the building. As the national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning's inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President, and avert an even bigger disaster.

In Mr. Butler's mind, this is the equivalent of Sex and the City 3. "I get mad when people say, 'Oh, it's such a boys' movie,'" he said, craning up to face the two towering women who stood a good half a foot above him in their heels. "It's actually quite a chick flick too." We're assuming by "chick flick," Mr. Butler meant that there are women in the film. (Specifically, two women: Melissa Leo and Angela Bassett.)

"It's totally for women," he said, still in pitch mode. "And you don't even have to be American to like it! I'm not, and I liked it."

Fair enough.

When one of the models coyly asked if he'd be bringing a beautiful girlfriend to the L.A. premiere, the suave 300 actor replied, "I don't know, what are you doing the 19th?"

When one of the models coyly asked if he’d be bringing a beautiful girlfriend to the L.A. premiere, the suave 300 actor replied, “I don’t know, what are you doing the 19th?”

But Mr. Butler wasn’t just a hit with the ladies. He also chatted up Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir, a longtime friend. “Gerry”—as most of the chummy attendees referred to the actor—must have gone through one too many waters during the film, however; as the night progressed, his trips to the bathroom became longer and longer, until one fan floated the theory that he might have slipped out the back, causing mass panic among the troops of models.

Outside, a group collected, including Mr. Saffir’s right-hand man, Shane Kidd, Pravda co-owner James Huddleston and Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus, whose strange habit of introducing every woman as “Potato” led to more than one confusing encounter.

The after-party was on the move, but in order to have a true Monday-night blowout at 1 a.m., it needed two things: a location and glamorous women. Since the latter would only be moved to action if “Gerry” was coming, and seeing how “Gerry” had slipped back into the now-empty Darby to spend another half-hour of quality bathroom time, the outside of the bar began to look like a strange version of a middle school dance: girls on one side, boys on the other.

Eventually Gerry Butler did manage to get whatever it was out of his system and made it back out to the sidewalk, where he announced that he would be accompanying the small band of partiers to The Rusty Knot on the West Side Highway. Sadly, by the time the cabs made the long, seven-block trek to the next location, the bar had already closed. And somehow, Gerry Butler had managed to disappear without a trace.

Depp.

The Rum Diary, based on another literary punch-out by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, was made three years ago, shelved in some musty editing room where unreleasable movies go, and looks it. The dust still shows.

Johnny Depp is dismally miscast as the alter ego of the rebellious author with the “screw you” attitude—a wasted, beat-up alcoholic who goes to Puerto Rico to work for a doomed newspaper called the San Juan Star whose faltering editor (Richard Jenkins, unrecognizable in a gray wig) is helpless to draw much attention to world events on a lawless island overwhelmed by gangsters and riots. Aaron Eckhart is an American P.R. mogul selling off pieces of pristine beachfront used for U.S. military target practice to rich corporate powers to build hotel towers, condos and ugly villas. After getting hired on to write promotional copy for brochures, the protagonist falls for his gorgeous girlfriend (Amber Heard) and a scene-stealing turtle named Harry with a jeweled shell. In no time, he gets fired, smashed to hamburger and left in a drunken stupor on a fly-specked floor. To Hunter S. Thompson fans—little boys weaned on comic books who never grew up to crave bare breasts and bare-knuckle beatings—it’s a call to arms. “There is no dream—just a piss puddle of greed, spreading throughout the world” is the cynical philosophy of the author, and the movie. With no job, no money, no girl and no future, the protagonist sees that the way to redeem himself as a journalist is to write an exposé of the criminal activities in San Juan—a sort of rum diary of corruption—and publish it. But how do you get your old mojo back when your paper is already closed down?

In an attempt to distract the viewer from the fact that there is nothing going on here, director Bruce Robinson cobbles in cockfights, sexual tension, a red convertible racing at breakneck speed, a traveling carnival, endless bottles of rum and a hermaphrodite witch doctor who drives a garbage truck. It’s all window dressing for an empty ruin, haunted by the hungover ghost of a mostly forgotten writer who died in 2005. The oddest thing about The Rum Diary, though, is all those half-nude shots of Mr. Depp, who is covered with tattoos, trying to camouflage them with Max Factor. Everyone has seen them, so if you’ve gone that far to abuse your body already, why not let it all hang out? In a role that is practically a beachcomber, the sun on that much greasepaint looks like he’s got spotted fever.

rreed@observer.com

THE RUM DIARY

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Bruce Robinson

Directed by Bruce Robinson

Starring Johnny Depp, Giovanni Ribisi and Aaron Eckhart

2/4

When this Canadian clambake was started back in 1976 by three eager film buffs in a Toronto saloon, they couldn't convince one Hollywood studio to send them a full-length feature. Thirty-five years later, TIFF is arguably the friendliest, most popular and best organized movie convention in the world. This year it sold 300,000 tickets to 300 films in 11 days, generated a revenue of $170 million; published a program book 448 pages long; and boasted a staff of 100 full-time employees, 19 programmers and an army of 2,000 unpaid volunteers in orange T-shirts who do everything from ushering to pouring salt on your popcorn. TIFF has come of age, and this year it has even moved into a brand-new permanent home at the Bell Lightbox, a sci-fi superdome on the site of an old parking lot owned by the father of director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), replete with art galleries, film libraries, five state-of-the-art screening rooms and two restaurants where the flacks and hacks gather to meet, greet and tweet. They're still $25 million short of their $196 million fund-raising campaign goal, but ready or not, they opened anyway, staging a Sunday afternoon block party with balloons, fireworks, live rock bands, celebrity arrivals and trucks of free cupcakes. One caveat: Along with smaller, glam-free flicks, the dynamic has changed geographically, too. Now that festival headquarters has shifted miles away, from the swanky neighborhood of Yorkville to the seedy downtown entertainment district near the waterfront, the annual Brangelina parties, shopping sprees at Tiffany's and posh luxury hotels are a thing of the past. With screening venues sprawled all over the city and the press agents and stars 10 miles away, it is nothing to spend $40 on a taxi ride between movies to share a cocktail with Catherine Deneuve. The red carpet premieres are on one side of town in traffic gridlock, but the boldface names have to travel to the gift lounges on the other side of town to collect their free swag bags of Hermés scarves, Gucci handbags and Canadian maple syrup.

Things were off to a rocky start. The TIFF opened in the middle of a bedbug invasion that left audiences at the early press previews complaining of bites on their thighs, backs and rear ends, and so armies equipped with pesticides invaded the combat zone in the days before the official red carpet rolled out, and sponsors and organizers have promised an "itch-free festival." So far, so good. But when all is said and done and the last projector starts rolling, the only that matters is the movies. Excelsior! This year, the richness and diversity has a higher quality than usual. From documentaries about disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer and the decline of American public education (starring Bill Gates), to a graphic gay porno film called L.A. Zombie that has been banned in Australia, there is something for everybody. After the opener, a campy musical about hockey with Olivia Newton-John that was generally dismissed as an embarrassment, things picked up with two of the best films I've seen in decades. Actor Ben Affleck has triumphed as both star and director of The Town, a cajones-in-your-face crime drama about the brutal crime scene in Boston's historic Charlestown neighborhood, labeled the bank robbery capital of America. Mr. Affleck is wonderful as the leader of a gang of violent, ruthless thieves who makes the mistake of falling for the pretty, blindfolded hostage who can turn them in to the Feds. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is especially creepy as the most vicious thug in the group, and Jon Hamm, in one of his first major roles since Mad Men, emerges as a powerful screen force in the role of a witty, hard-boiled F.B.I. agent. Set in the Boston alleys and Irish bars familiar to Scorsese and Eastwood, and featuring a $3 million robbery during a pivotal Red Sox game in Fenway Park, it is a film with a grip as smart and unforgettable as it is fresh and surprising. The Town is the best heist movie--as well as the most intensely plotted, brilliantly written and carefully directed film about the complex members of a criminal gang--since The Asphalt Jungle. Equally memorable is Never Let Me Go, a lyrical, haunting and lushly photographed adaptation of the great book by metaphysical novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), about idyllic children growing up in a baronial English country school who love, laugh and learn about life as all children do, until we discover [ed note: Spoiler alert!] they are clones in a dystopian government project, secretly marketed for the purpose of donating their organs to society in order to save mankind. Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated marvel from An Education, leads a splendid cast that includes Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins, in a cautionary tale about the dangers of science vs. humanity. One of the few films I've seen lately that audiences and critics were still debating fiercely days after its premiere, Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking, imaginative work of art that left me devastated. So did Hereafter, a touching triptych of stories related to the theme of life after death; it finds Clint Eastwood in a more muted tone than usual, with Matt Damon as a sensitive psychic.

After nine months of Hollywood drivel, TIFF is always the launching pad for works of more serious ambition. Common underlying themes in the films coming this fall include people seeking dignity in the face of overwhelming adversity and the sad desperation of terminally lonely people trying to connect in a troubled world--to someone, some place, some sense of justice and meaning, anything! As the director of Trust, actor David Schwimmer does a disturbing job of tackling the terrifying world of Internet predators. In this powerful drama, an emotionally vulnerable 14-year-old in Chicago falls for a boy she believes to be a cute California volleyball player in a popular chat room, but when he arrives in person, while her parents are out of town, he turns out to be a 35-year-old rapist who is nothing like his photos or promises. The story centers on the disastrous effects of the rape on the girl as well as her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener), as they all cope with a nightmare that changes their lives forever. Tony Goldwyn's Conviction is the inspirational true-life story of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), a Massachusetts wife and mother who devotes her life to proving the innocence of her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after he is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Neglecting her husband and two sons while scrimping and saving to put herself through law school, she pulls every lever in the corrupt legal system with the aid of famed attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) to reopen the case, only to discover after 16 years of work that the DNA evidence has been destroyed. The film chronicles her undying faith as she overcomes one obstacle after another;  Ms. Swank is aided by a first-rate cast (Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, Minnie Driver and others) and a script that plays like a detective yarn. The ending will leave you cheering. Beautiful Boy is a wrenching story about two parents in a rocky marriage (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) who are shocked to heartrending depths of despair when their perfect 18-year-old son commits a mass shooting on his college campus before taking his own life. In the hot new "hunky alpha males in jeopardy" genre, nothing could be more harrowing than 127 Hours and Buried. The first one is writer-director Danny Boyle's first film since the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, the true story of adventurer Aron Ralston, who fell through a crevice on a hiking trip through Utah in 2003 and lay pinned under a boulder for 127 hours until he was forced to cut off his own arm to save his life. A graphic story of courage and survival guaranteed to make you pinch yourself to keep from fainting, with James Franco giving a heroic performance, it forced several members of the audience to be carried out on stretchers during an early preview in Sundance. Not for sissies. In Buried, Ryan Reynolds is a civilian truck driver delivering kitchen supplies in Iraq who wakes up in a wooden coffin underground with no oxygen and a cigarette lighter running out of fluid. With my heart pounding and nerves jangled, I was only able to stand it until the snake showed up. But I wasn't bored.

If proof was ever required that the movie business has changed, consider Robert Redford. The once glamorous and hugely powerful commodity is here like everybody else, shlepping a new film he directed with independent money called The Conspirator, hoping to interest a distributor. It will need all the shlepping it can get. The Conspirator takes place two years after the Civil War during those dark days of April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. John Wilkes Booth, who was gunned down before the curtain fell, is just a peripheral player in the aftermath of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Seven men and one lone woman--all civilians--are accused of being co-conspirators in a corrupt trial that should have been tried by a jury, not a military tribunal. The war department, run by Lincoln-appointed Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), is so hell-bent on pacifying a country desperate to avenge the president's murder that it sacrifices the Constitutional rights of an innocent woman without a shred of evidence. The result is a shameful trial that is both immoral and illegal. Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is guilty of nothing more than the misfortune of owning the boardinghouse where Booth sometimes visited and his followers lived, but even after the court finds her not guilty, Secretary of State Stanton changes the verdict and makes Mrs. Surratt the first woman ever sent to the gallows in the U.S. With excellent performances by Ms. Wright (she's dropped the Penn), James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston, a carefully researched screenplay and the kind of period authenticity most indie-prods on a reduced budget only dream about, Mr. Redford has provided a worthy footnote to a part of American history they do not teach in classrooms. The Conspirator has "worthy" stamped all over it with a capital "W," but to me, it lacks momentum, its commercial prospects seem dim and with a running time of more than two hours, it is somber to the point of tedium.

Not bad for a first week in Toronto. And still more new films by Jean Luc Godard, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Francois Ozon, Stephen Frears, Darren Aronofsky, John Carpenter and Werner Herzog to sift through, plus Kevin Spacey as crooked politician Jack Abramoff, and Mickey Rourke as a broken-down jazz musician stranded in the desert who falls in love with the Bird Woman in a traveling circus. So many movies, so little time. Sleep, balanced meals, exercise--they're all on hold. You live on pizza, candy bars and eye drops. Then you prop your eyes open and head for another double feature.

rreed@observer.com

Don’t be confused by what you see on Fandango: there are actually a bunch of movies possibly worth seeing this weekend. September starts to come out of the doldrums today with four films hitting theaters, and, as usual, there is something for everyone. As we do every Friday, here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

Jennifer’s Body

What’s the story: Here’s a movie we should probably be more excited about. From writer Diablo Cody comes a horror-comedy-satire about a high school queen bee (the vapid Megan Fox) who gets possessed by the devil and has to feast on teenage boys to survive. Honest to blog! Unfortunately, the reviews have been spotty, with most questioning director Karyn Kusama’s decision to make the final half of the film so straightforward. Whatever, we’ll probably still see it, just to watch Adam Brody (Seth Cohen for life!) trade in his Penguin polo shirts for guyliner as the lead singer of a Panic At the Disco!-like band.

Who should see it: Juno.

The Informant!

What’s the story: Now this is a movie we’re legitimately excited about! Steven Soderbergh takes Mark Whitacre’s real life account of being a whistle blower for the F.B.I. and turns it into an absurdist comedy starring Matt Damon (who gained 30 pounds for the role). The trailer for this thing is laugh-out-loud funny—only those made of stone wouldn’t laugh at Mr. Damon calling himself “0014” because he’s “twice as good as 007”—and reviews have been on the good side of positive. The Informant! looks like the type of populist film that Mr. Soderbergh does best. If only he would have been allowed to do something similar with Moneyball.

Who should see it: Amy Pascal.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

What’s the story: Based on the popular children’s book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs tells the story of a town where all food falls from the heavens like rain (hence the title). As is usually the case with animated films, Meatballs has a pretty talented and hilarious vocal cast. Among them: Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Andy Samberg, Will Forte, Neil Patrick Harris, James Caan and… Mr. T? We wonder if he’ll get the opportunity to talk about staying in school. Fingers crossed!

Who should see it:Sam Champion.

Love Happens

What’s the story: Does Hollywood have a bottomless pit of generic romantic comedies to foist upon us, the beleaguered audience? You know, don’t answer that. Love Happens (even the title doesn’t try) follows a widower-turned-self-help-guru (Aaron Eckhart) who finds love in the form of Jennifer Aniston’s florist. Not even Judy Greer—in the typical “Judy Greer role”—can make us want to see this thing. That being said, it can’t possibly be as bad as All About Steve.

Who should see it: Brad Pitt.

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Erin Brockovich [starting @ 11:40 p.m. on Encore]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: For an actress being touted as on the comeback trail, Julia Roberts works pretty steadily. Duplicity, opening tomorrow, is her 10th live action film since 2000, and with two more in development (adaptations of the best-selling books Eat, Prey, Love and The Friday Night Knitting Club) there won’t be much moss gathering on America’s Sweetheart in the coming years, despite what you might think. We guess since the Tony Gilroy–helmed caper is her first lead role since Mona Lisa Smile in 2003, people are acting like the original Pretty Woman went into a Debra Winger–like seclusion. To us, though, it just looks like her choices have matured. And we guess that all started with Erin Brockovich.

Perhaps in the hands of a lesser director, the film would have been pat and tired—yet another small town–versus–evil corporation legal drama in the vein of Silkwood. But Steven Soderbergh never lets that happen. He keeps the tone perfectly balanced between funny and sad, and the film manages to be affecting without ever becoming mawkish. (Unless you’re made of stone, there’s a good chance CSI’s Marg Helgenberger—in a small role as a cancer-stricken mother—will turn on your waterworks.) Mr. Soderbergh won an Oscar in 2000 for Traffic, but for our money, his dually nominated direction on Erin Brockovich is even better.

Of course, Ms. Roberts did work with some great filmmakers prior to hooking up with Mr. Soderbergh. Unfortunately, she usually did so on their worst films—Steven Spielberg’s Hook and Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter come to mind. Since Erin Brockovich however, Ms. Roberts has become something all actors and actresses strive for: she’s picky. And can you blame her? After getting what amounts to the role of a lifetime, it’s no wonder Ms. Roberts pulled back from being the biggest female star in the world. How can she top Erin Brockovich?

When we’ll probably fall asleep: It’s hard to imagine Aaron Eckhart playing a believable biker, complete with tattoos and ridiculous long hair, but that’s just what he does in Erin Brockovich. As Erin’s boyfriend, George, Mr. Eckhart turns what could be a stereotype into a loving and doting man for all seasons; that the screenplay eventually forces his character to act like a petulant jerk is one of the only missteps in the entire movie. Thankfully, before he shuffles off to serve the wills of the script gods, Mr. Eckhart gets to participate in the best moment of the film. So we’ll make it until 1:05 a.m., 85 minutes in, when while driving home in the middle of the night, Erin hears from a half-asleep George about her baby daughter’s first word. We’re pretty sure "ball" never sounded so touching.

So whom did we nab? Screenwriter David Goyer! “This film is intense intense,” he said. “It’s about escalation, both good and bad.” What’s new about this Batman? “He’s the most realistic. In both films, we made sure that the technology he uses is based on technology that is being used or developed by the Department of Defense right now.” Now that’s truly scary. …

“More intelligent and more human,” said Michael Caine, who plays Bat-butler Alfred Pennyworth, wearing a black suit created for him by his recently deceased English tailor (“I can’t get any more alterations!”), when asked about the updated superhero.

Lauren Conrad of the splashy reality series The Hills was crowing about her maiden visit to the Hamptons. “It was great,” she said. “Beautiful.”

But overall, the mood was muted. A black carpet lined the entrance to the theater, and the absence of the late Heath Ledger (the Joker) was palpable. “I’m very thankful to have worked with him,” said the actor Chin Han. “He was so inventive—it was invigorating.”

cbankoff@observer.com

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree. The Dark Knight takes up where it left off, but if it’s a follow-up that introduces a comprehensive sociopath called the Joker, then how do you explain the fact that the Joker made his debut years ago as Jack Nicholson? It’s just one of the things that makes no sense, but hey-ho, since when did Batman and logic morph?

The Dark Knight is preposterous, unnecessary and a far, far cry from the old DC Comics of my youth created by Bob Kane. But before the hate mail pours in, let me confess I’m a fool for this stuff, and if “logic” is a word you cannot apply to this movie, neither is “boring.” Compared with the summer’s other action potboilers, it’s a Coney Island roller coaster ride with some of the rails missing. It begins with a bank robbery that ends with most of the villains dead and the bravest bank officer with a hand grenade in his mouth attached to a school bus. When the bus pulls away … well, zing goes the strings of his heart. This is the work of the Joker, an archfiend who suffers from rabies of the soul—and cherry-picks his victims at will from the populace of Gotham. While Batman (Christian Bale is back—stronger, hunkier and braver than ever) tries to destroy organized crime in Gotham City, the Joker targets a living hell for the police lieutenant (Gary Oldman), cyberspace wizard Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the new D.A. (Aaron Eckhart), his pretty assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who is the object of affection of both the D.A. and Batman, and last—but not least—Batman himself! What follows is two and a half hours of plunder-and-rescue missions where everyone plunders, and there’s always somebody new to rescue. Oddly, it’s the Joker’s movie all the way, and even with his Emmett Kelly whiteface and lipstick-smeared permanent smile slashed jaw to jaw by a razor blade, you know it’s Heath Ledger, hamming it up outrageously in his last film role. He chews a lot of scenery and swallows a lot of asbestos.

I liked it better when playboy Bruce Wayne lived in a dark, underground cave (with or without Robin). Now he’s in a penthouse with sunshine pouring through glass walls and breakfast served in bed by Michael Caine. Add sonar cell phones that blow up entire buildings, a Batman costume that is more than a rack item from the studio wardrobe department (now he actually sprouts bat wings and flies, like Bela Lugosi), more explosives sewn inside a human stomach, helicopters, SWAT teams, and three million citizens held hostage with the entire city set to blow up at the stroke of midnight while the Joker holds the detonator—and you know why Gotham City thinks Batman has crossed over to the dark side.

So let’s get back to Heath Ledger. The Joker is the worst kind of maniac (and the best kind to play) because he craves crime, punishment, anguish and brutality for its own sake, and with no name, no DNA, no labels in his clothes, no dental records, no computer matches, and no F.B.I. files, he can’t be caught. Mr. Ledger plays him like he’s aiming for the Oscar he lost for Brokeback Mountain, with a flat accent unlike any he’s used before, twisting his mouth in a wormy wiggle, licking the inside of his lower lip, doing lewd and lascivious things with his lickety-split tongue like a mental patient. He’s scary and crazy and sometimes very funny, especially in a red Bozo wig and a female nurse’s uniform. When he describes coming face to face with Batman as “what happens when an indestructible force meets an old immovable object,” I laughed aloud. Was I the only one who knew he was quoting the Johnny Mercer lyrics to “Something’s Gotta Give,” sung by Fred Astaire in Daddy Long Legs? The Joker is indestructible. Batman is incorruptible. And The Dark Knight is insurmountable fun.

rreed@observer.com

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, is, of course, ultimately from a series of comic books published by DC Comics, with the creation of the Batman character attributed to Bob Kane. In the world of comic-book superheroes, the Batman franchise has specialized in the most eccentrically colorful villains. I still remember Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman character looking out of the corner of his eye at Jack Nicholson’s clownish antics as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the second such cinematic transfer after Laslia Martinson’s 1966 Batman, with Adam West reprising in a campy fashion his hit television role. I remember also Milton Berle’s smirking at the idea of Batman’s “Ward,” Robin (played by Burt Ward), by pursing his lips as he pronounced “Ward.” The comically homophobic Berle also had fun with the name “Bruce.” Anyway, Robin is nowhere to be found in this new ultra-adult version running some 152 minutes and aptly titled The Dark Knight. Indeed, Mr. Nolan’s is a darker and more nihilistic Batman than any of the other six previous forays into the illuminated night sky of Gotham City, with such other Bruce Wayne/Batman impersonators, besides Mr. West and Mr. Keaton, as Val Kilmer, George Clooney and, in Mr. Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins (2005), Christian Bale. Mr. Bale continues in The Dark Knight along with such other cast members from Batman Begins as Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Michael Caine as Batman’s major-domo and father figure, Alfred; and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s business adviser and facilitator.

As it happens, there are three additions to the cast that lift the film into the artistic stratosphere. First and foremost is the late Heath Ledger as the Joker; he transfigures this traditionally villainous role with a ghostly grandeur that has already impelled some journalists to look up the short roster of posthumous Oscar winners, though in this instance it should be for a lead role rather than a supporting one. Almost as impressive are Aaron Eckhart as the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes, Dent’s legal assistant, who’s torn emotionally between her employer and Bruce Wayne/Batman, with whom she has had a long-term relationship.

What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.

The extraordinary charisma of the three new arrivals has managed to dim the luster of Batman himself. It is not Mr. Bale’s fault that the director has chosen to downplay the sacredly secret duality of Wayne/Batman; previously a deity, here he tends to be treated as just another guy hanging around police stations and gangster joints. Mr. Nolan even shifts the action briefly to Hong Kong to add Asian flavor the proceedings, perhaps because China has become so obtrusively involved in our affairs and our so-called way of life.

For that matter, Ledger’s Joker takes on the dimension of every terrorist in our most fearful imagination. He is something of a genius with high explosives and their electronic detonators. He always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities, and, on occasion, even Batman himself. By the time he has completely terrorized the people of Gotham City by blowing up half the metropolis, and ingeniously engineering the assassination of its mayor, the people are fleeing on ferries because the bridges and tunnels are too vulnerable to the Joker’s limitless terror stratagems. Ironically, Ledger’s Joker kills more mobsters than all the city’s police forces. But it’s not their loot he is after, but simply an acknowledgment by Batman and the district attorney that the battles of good vs. evil are simply exercises in futility. Finally, Batman’s greatest fear is that the Joker will completely succeed in corrupting the citizens of Gotham City, and by the time the film is over, one is not quite sure if good has really triumphed over evil. What is certain, however, is that the struggle will continue well into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

The copious production notes for the film tell us: “Six sequences of The Dark Knight were filmed with IMAX cameras, including the opening six minutes. This marks the first time ever that a major feature film has been even partially shot using IMAX cameras, marking a revolutionary integration of the two film formats. The IMAX Experience will appear in IMAX DMR (letterbox) while scenes shot with IMAX cameras on 15/70mm film will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen, which can be up to eight stories tall, for an all-encompassing moviegoing experience.”

I must confess that I did not see The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen as I was promised by the distributor. It seems that Kung Fu Panda had a prior claim to the IMAX screen. No matter; I have survived such “revolutionary” advances as 3-D, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and who can remember what else? All I can say is that in my humbly Luddite opinion, The Dark Knight doesn’t have to go eight stories high to impress me with its technical virtuosity, for which I must thank, in addition to the Nolan brothers, the director of photography, Wally Pfister; the production designer, Nathan Crowley; the editor, Lee Smith; composers Hans Zimmer and Newton Howard; and the costume designer, Lindy Hemming.

HAVING NOW PRAISED The Dark Knight to the skies, and recommended it to everyone this side of Gotham City, I must ask the reader to read no further in my review of this masterpiece because I am about to reveal its darkest secret. (In other words, spoiler alert.) And what is that? Now, don’t peek. It is simply the wanton slaughter of the two most dynamic and most idealistic innocents, Mr. Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Ms. Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes. Their deaths are testaments to the omnipotently anarchic evil of Ledger’s Joker. And for once, Bruce Wayne/Batman, for all his wiles and wizardry, is unable to save either Dent or Rachel, when earlier Batmen could have rescued them with a climatic swoop of their Batmobile, and have thrown in a wedding for the two virtuous lovers besides.

="letter-spacing: -0.1pt">But Mr. Nolan seems to have fallen into a darker mood between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, less than three years later. Has the world changed that much for the worse in the interim? One is hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative, though it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero. Actually, the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly because Mr. Nolan and his collaborators have not gone out of their way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. The political issues in The Dark Knight remain local and municipal, not really global despite the aforementioned excursion to Hong Kong.

Yet at a time when all social systems are veering toward moral bankruptcy, I was struck by the way Gotham City is presented for the first time in Batman movie history as a city with global connections, and not merely as a self-contained abstraction of a city with its own hermetically sealed morality and innocence.

Of the two precedent-shattering victims of the Joker’s anarchic ability to corrupt the most law-abiding citizens into betraying their friends and associates, Rachel is disposed of fairly quickly and without much suffering. Dent’s destruction, by contrast, is excruciatingly prolonged by its being divided into two stages, the first when half of his face is burned up at the very moment when Batman is desperately trying to save his life. Dent then briefly becomes a Batman-genre grotesque nicknamed Two-Face, who goes on a murderous spree directed against the once-trusted individuals who had betrayed him and Rachel. The Joker has thus succeeded in turning the once-crusading-for-justice Dent into everything he had previously hated.

In the end, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Alfred and Lucius Fox try to pick up the pieces of a shattered community, but their hearts don’t seem to be in it. Too many good people have died in a seemingly futile effort to reform their society. Doesn’t that seem too close to the daily world news, even though The Dark Knight is not intentionally trying to establish any real-life parallels with its own gory fictions?

I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan’s work, even though he has been much honored for his stylistic innovations in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006). But after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema.

asarris@observer.com

Ten years ago, when Mr. Eckhart, now 39, was a “struggling New York actor,” he was out for an evening stroll in the midst of the winter holiday season. “Snow on the street, lights in the trees of Gramercy Park—beautiful, the night, gorgeous, holding hands with my then-girlfriend,” he said, pausing to look at his now-girlfriend, a tall dirty-blonde with chiseled features. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he told her sheepishly, wearing a leather jacket over a blue sweater and denim shirt. Looking back at the Daily Transom, he went on, “A car comes around a corner, honks his horn at another car, I said, ‘Shut up!’ and he said, ‘Fuck you!’ and then drove off into the night. And that’s when I realized that I was in New York City!”

As for his view of Halloween here, a more city-wise Mr. Eckhart simply views it as “a normal day in New York City,” he offered with a chuckle. “I like when people dress up as boxes of things, like Milk Duds. I always think that’s a clever disguise, because I just like being boxes of things. I’ve never done it myself, but I admire those who have the guts to do it. It takes courage.”

He just finished shooting Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the newest installment in the Batman franchise, in which he plays Gotham’s district attorney Harvey Dent alongside fellow actors Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Gary Oldman. Next up: Traveling—a romantic comedy co-starring Jennifer Aniston.