The Dark Knight (2008)

A bank robbery is committed by a gang led by a man known as The Joker. An examination of a few remaining money bills reveals to the police that it was a Mob bank. The police now have the names of all banks used by the Mob, and raid them. A Chinese businessman named Lau, acting as a Mob accountant, has, however, moved all the money to a secure place. A vigilante variously known as Batman or The Batman, who acts in tacit agreement with the police, travels to Hong Kong to seize Mr. Lau and deliver him to the American authorities. A new District Attorney named Dent works on Lau to persuade him to inform on his Mob associates. Dent is a rising star and is on the verge of cleaning the City from the Mob. After a few more plot turns, The Joker is hired by the Mob to kill The Batman.

This film is ranked fourth in IMDB's best movies of all time according to user votes. I confess to not having enjoyed it all that much. I suspect that the filmmaker or filmmakers' design was to produce a filmic equivalent to its protagonist's subjective experience from inside his armor. That would explain why the plot feels so overcrowded, and so does every frame, and why the narrative seems to move in such a jerky and heavy-handed manner. As numerous viewers have noticed, the plot is full of holes, and yet there is a semblance of deadly seriousness and an almost maniacal attention to detail. The topic of vigilantism versus the rule of law is discussed in superficial terms. The film has psychological and thematical aspects akin to those found in the popular Saw franchise, initiated in 2004. Those aspects are mostly related to moral quandaries which are artificially imposed on the characters, and which occasionally reproduce game-theoretical scenarios. The ending is an inversion of the premise for the short story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, by Jorge Luis Borges, which was first published in 1944 and inspired the film The Spider's Stratagem. This literary parallel has not escaped a few attentive viewers before me, as in the following internet text:

Traitor and Hero, Borges and Nolan

Rating: 45