Helas!

Would have been, should have been the best thing to have happened to superhero movies. The menace: demented, real, brilliant, complicated, un-marooned, deliciously evil. Dark and good boldly playing off each other, until the rules were smudged. Of circumstance, defining morality.

There were of course moments, moments of exhilarating evil, like the joker waving his machine gun in a careening car, framed against a rushing new-york night. But the story was lost in its episodes, its platitudes, in protecting that stiff upper lip. Somewhere along, the script lost its joy, its ambition. It nudged the envelope, but didn’t break loose the riot.

A swaying madman, unhinged, unrelenting, vicious, the belief in the breaking point of every person's morality, the treatise on blurring right from wrong, Heath Ledger's blaze of glory.