When we walk into the multiplex I think about Lascaux. How did we get from there to here in only 35,000 years? Is that how long it took to have the awe bred out of us? The walls of this cave are covered with posters for Summer Blockbusters, promising life- changing experiences… Loud! Large! Lubricious! It’s hard to tell where the posters leave off and the electronic games offered for our pre-amusement amusement begin. They both jangle and bleep and explode in frantic, meaningless volleys. Along with the carpet done in plush swirls, they seem designed to induce projectile vomiting. The smell of popcorn mingles with a faint undertone of urinal puck. We are not in a holy place.

The fuzzy floor slopes toward the snack, souvenir, and espresso bar where the young man who has dedicated all of his testosterone to growing a soul patch is training the young lady with serious sniffles how to use the cash register. The line isn’t moving. We would have passed it by anyway.

Off in the back are sixteen small thin -walled rooms. Our $8 senior tickets allow us access to one. After seven or eight intense previews shown with the amps turned to 11, we get to watch Batman.

I love movies. Even here, even now in my dotage, living in a small town on the wrong coast, I am ready to be ravaged by images and sound, swept up, tumbled and spat out. Batman; the Dark Knight, isn’t a sweeping, tumbling, spitter.

Graphic novels should make good movies. Comics are dreamlike; they “leap and linger” like old ballads; the pictures are disturbing; they touch primal areas of the cortex. This film has part of it right. Gotham City is properly rank and sepia toned. Heath Ledger’s Joker, with a face like a ruined birthday cake, projects evil at its most elemental, antic best. It’d as if he’d had his own writer and director.

The whole thing falls apart however when he is not on screen. Michael Caine walks through his part. Christian Bale, despite the baritone rasp he has chosen, lacks ballast. The White Knight, a righteous DA, who turns to the dark side after his face is burnt off, is played by a very handsome actor whose name I and everyone else who has seen the film have forgotten. Morgan Freeman shows up for some reason, but there’s not enough of him to do much good.

The plot is a Manichean mish-mosh, like something devised by Raymond Chandler self-medicating with LSD after developing Alzheimer’s. The evil-doers do evil; the good-doers do some evil too, albeit inadvertently, or when driven to it by circumstances, such as burnt-off faces or mild pique. Batman’s ladylove buys the farm. Commissioner Gordon dies and is resurrected. In the end the Caped Crusader takes the blame for everything but the Lindbergh kidnapping and retires in disgrace. The White Knight, aka “Two-Face”, is given spurious, posthumous credit for ridding the city of several hundred gangsters and bad cops. Chaos/ Evil has all the best lines; Order/Good is tedious. The Bat Signal is extinguished, and Godless Gotham is left bereft.

The End

Eight bucks poorer, Pat