Writer / Director: Christopher Nolan | Co-Writer:Jonathan Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger Keith Legend, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Cain, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman

Released in cinemas July 18, 2008

So I bet you haven’t heard anything about this new batman movie, right? Well that’s just because it’s had hardly any publicity. Especially under rocks.

As you may have noticed in recent decades, movies that have marketing and publicity budgets as large as the already frightening costs of most Hollywood blockbusters seldom live up to the sensationalist hype.

Unfortunately, The Dark Knight is definitely one of these numbers.

For those of us who haven’t been whittling our attention spans away on Facebook and Ritilin for the last few years still remember the previous Batman franchise that Hollywood had to offer. For those readers who have been using facebook, in 1989 Tim Burton made a film called Batman starring Michael Keaton as the tight-wearing crime-fighter and Jack Nicholson as the psychotic Joker.

The first film was pretty good, focusing on how Batman came to be Batman and how the Joker came to be the Joker. Unfortunately, the second film in the series, Batman Returns, was not really as well realised as the first one; storyline issues and multiple villain back-stories involving Catwoman and the Penguin made the film much campier than the first and began the slide into total farce that were the final two films in the series.

Such is the apparently the case here too. After box-office success, Hollywood is already making statements about the stars of the next Batman sequel that hasn’t even been written yet. Soon enough we’ll see Jim Carey reprise his brilliant role as the Riddler. What a surprise…

Oh, the other side of the hype that you may have heard is that OUR Keith Legend puts in a jaw-dropping performance and deserves an Oscar for it. If you decided Jeff Buckley was a genius after he died, you probably think so too.

Batman is based on a comic book.

Rating: 3 Out of 5