BATMAN, the poor guy is lost under the camouflage of costume, grittily garbled voice and a passionless sex life. Enough said about him. Like the six movies shown in previews before it, our unquenchable hero struggles but can’t survive the over-weighted dynamics of the studio’s special effects department.

I love the Fourth of July and its twenty minutes of super incendiary fireworks. The Dark Knight is 2 - hours of pyrotechnical megalomania. The film is 1 - hours too long, unless you like watching men snarling at each other with nothing further to do and crowds cowering at men snarling at each other with nothing more dramatic to do. There are snarky eighteen wheelers somersaulting around and over each other—that was good. The best detonation scene was a sequential blowing-up of Gotham Hospital—good. Otherwise, I was numbed by the repetition and excesses—though it’s just what the kids like. I was the parent who went along for the ride and felt as if she’d been stuck in the Holland Tunnel for a three-day weekend.

Excitement level: (honestly?) D+.

Heath Ledger, as good as he tried to be, could have used more help from the camera. Remember the angles on the Batman TV series? We could have seen him upside down, through a tunnel lens, or being zapped suddenly into scenes. He didn’t feel scary enough to the audience to have sent all of Gotham City to the bone house. And where was the humor? OK, no humor. What about terror? A slow ride up the roller coaster of fear would have helped. Remember Hitchcock’s seductive shower scene in Psycho? That kind of on-screen intimidation makes the up-coming scene of blood spattering annihilation work. I could have stood in the street outside the theatre after glazing myself at a bar and had a more wrenching experience. Frankly, I yawned loudly and yearned for some deep comfort, which the seats at the Mann Theatre in Santa Monica were not.

I think I’ll watch a rerun of “The Red Shoes”.