First of all let’s begin with the incredible stats. You’ve got a super hero film with 3 actors that have either won an Oscar or been nominated for one. That is some pretty big lumber to be swinging (Especially for a comic book film). Academy Award nominee Heath Ledger stars as arch-villain The Joker, with his own brilliant take on this iconic role. Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over the role of Rachel Dawes, making us forget that Katie Holmes ever played the character. Returning to the cast and reprising their original roles from Batman Begins are Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon, Oscar winner Michael Caine as Alfred, and Oscar winner Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox.

Let’s just get it out of the way. Heath Ledger was positively incredible. Don’t let the death of Heath Ledger cloud your ability to judge an incredible performance. He in fact deserves to be nominated for best actor in a supporting role. Heath delivers such an incredible performance as the newly realized Joker. How incredibly imaginative he must be to take a roll that he has seen his entire life and still be able to do something completely different with it. I don’t pretend to know how difficult it is to play a role like the joker. You are dressed silly, you are told to act silly, your makeup is silly and yet you are supposed to be “cool”. You’re supposed to be able to deliver a dramatic performance and actually look like you belong in the scene. Most actors would just look like complete jack asses in that situation. It takes incredibly high caliber actors to pull that off. We’ve seen it in Jack Nicholson and now in the late Heath Ledger.

The entire film was as solid as a coffin nail. Christian Bale really does play a great Batman and the entire supporting cast, all the way down to the butler is incredibly good. It may be the best batman ever actually. The weakest point of the film actually has got to be listening to Christian Bale talk when he’s batman. That’s actually a great example of how hard it is to still be cool and smooth when you have all that silly gear on and you are asked to do a different voice because frankly Christian Bale cannot do it.

Don’t let the Batman title fool you. This is NOT a kid’s movie. It is incredibly hard core. The old joker played by Jack Nicholson was by and large a silly character. He was crazy but he was largely ineffective and had funny little gadgets and stuff. Heath Ledger’s Joker was a complete schizophrenic. (SPOILER) In his opening scene he stabs a pencil into the table so that it’s sticking eraser up and then slams a man’s head onto it, making the entire pencil vanish into the man’s face killing him. (END SPOILER) It only gets worse from there. The Joker has no regard for anyone. Men, women, children…no one is safe.

The acting was better, the villains were much more exciting, and it’s astonishing how high the bar has suddenly been raised in the last year for super hero/comic films. To think in the last 12 months we’ve been slammed with Iron Man, Hulk, and Batman. I don’t know if my heart can take any more high quality super hero’s for a while.