Although it was touch and go there for a while, finally a motion picture - and a genuine blockbuster at that - beat out "Sex and the City" for the loudest hype, the longest lines, the largest box office, and even the highest praise from the reviewers. That movie, based on decades of the popular comic books and the recent success of the more ambitious graphic novels, is of course "The Dark Knight," the latest installment in the Batman saga.

Appropriately for a film franchise, "The Dark Knight" features a number of actors repeating their roles from the previous Batman film - Christian Bale as the title character, along with Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman - which creates a kind of continuity for the viewers, who can respond to the familiar faces and find comfort in the mixture as before. This time around, as everyone points out, the Joker returns, impersonated by the late Heath Ledger, whose performance inspires numerous recommendations for a posthumous Oscar. Knowing the sentimentality of the Motion Picture Academy, which surpasses even that of the reviewers, such an award seems entirely possible.

The movie also continues the tone of the graphic novels, establishing a special darkness of mood and intensifying the violence and bloodshed. This time Batman and his adversaries move beyond the usual over-dramatized fistfights and knockouts to actual, sometimes shocking killings. The Joker initiates that practice in his opening sequence, the robbery of a Mob bank in which, after cracking the vault and stealing millions of dollars, he calmly kills all his henchmen.

The Joker builds a sort of coalition of criminals, uniting a whole rainbow of ethnic mafias to support his attempt to create total disorder in Gotham and defeat the Batman.  Disdaining money - he torches the mountain of cash he steals - he tells the Batman that he only desires chaos, the fulfillment of his psychotic love of lawlessness and anarchy, a totally negative creation. In the process of achieving that aim he gleefully blows up a good deal of the Gotham landscape, including a hospital, and wounds, maims, and kills a great many people, mostly for the sheer fun of it all.

Aside from the Joker, the Batman confronts a whole bushel of difficulties related to the ambiguity of his character. Gotham's law enforcement establishment regards him as a dangerous vigilante who usurps the proper functions of the police and inspires a bunch of idiotic imitators, who dress up in costumes and clumsily attempt to fight crime in their own inept way. In the manner of the contemporary comic book hero, Batman also broods endlessly about the ethics of his methods and the results of his actions, which have accidentally harmed a number of people, including some close to him.

Although the situation of the psychotic criminal and the ambivalent crime fighter engenders some of the purported moral complexity of the movie, it hardly affects the action, which again mostly fulfills the expectations of its audience. The confused physical conflicts, the shootouts, the car chases and crashes, the multiple explosions all look very much like the basic stuff of the common or garden variety blockbuster. Unlike its cousins, however, "The Dark Knight" practically talks itself to death, with much of its two and a half hours consisting of long, repetitive conversations and chatty exposition.

To his credit, Heath Ledger certainly dominates the movie, cackling, wheezing, drooling, and now and then sounding rather like Marlon Brando in those eccentric performances of his later years. This skinny little guy's apparent invincibility resembles the super powers of most heroes of his form - he cows all the gangs, beats the hell out of the muscular Batman, infiltrates every gathering - and grows sillier and sillier as the movie progresses. The Dark Knight himself finally provides the proper note of cornball melodrama at the end, and naturally prepares the audience for another chapter in his adventures.

As for the picture itself, despite all the superlatives from all the tame reviewers, it's only another movie after all, hardly an especially remarkable example of the art and not all that much better than the usual exploits of any comic book superhero. The masked avenger racket grows increasingly crowded and increasingly tiresome as the summers wear on.

The Dark Knight

(PG-13), directed by Christopher Nolan.

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