CHRISTIAN BALE stars as Batman in Warner Bros. Picturesí and Legendary Picturesí action drama ìThe Dark Knight,î distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and also starring Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Morgan Freeman.

By Glenn Whipp, c. Los Angeles Daily News

Arriving midsummer after the heroics of Indy and Iron Man, Hulk and Hellboy and that wise-guy bullet-bender from “Wanted,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” better pack a lot of wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-whop-bam-boom or risk irrelevancy.

The good news: It does. Nolan has crafted an exceedingly ambitious, unrelentingly dark follow-up to “Batman Begins” and has surpassed that flawed film in every way. Where the first movie had trouble transcending its origin story, “The Dark Knight” takes square aim at the nature of terrorism in a post- 9/11 world, arguing that “some men aren’t looking for anything logical. Some men just want to see the world burn.”

You’ve probably guessed that the movie’s villain, The Joker, falls into that camp, though you could not say that Heath Ledger’s terrifying performance in any way approaches camp. Jack Nicholson played The Joker as a maniacal song-and-dance man. Ledger, with his smeared clown makeup, portrays the character as a truly frightening freak.

“I’m like a dog chasing a car,” The Joker tells a would-be disciple.

“But I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one.”

Nolan, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan, gets good mileage, as did Tim Burton, from the commonality between the clown-faced terrorist and bat-suited vigilante. Batman (Christian Bale), though, longs to hang up the cowl mask and sees his opportunity arrive with the ascendancy of Gotham’s new district attorney, a committed crime fighter named Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, delivering his best work in a studio film).

Dent is Batman’s lawmaker soul mate. He’s also millionaire Bruce Wayne’s rival for Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking over, in a definite upgrade, for Katie Holmes), the woman who makes Bruce’s heart skip a beat.

CHRISTIAN BALE stars as Batman in Warner Bros. Picturesí and Legendary Picturesí action drama ìThe Dark Knight,î distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and also starring Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Morgan Freeman.

This being a superhero movie, it’s a safe bet that there’s no picket fence in Batman’s future. The Nolans, though, dig deeper, wanting to hammer home the personal cost of heroism and of doing the right thing even when the populace turns against you.

In other words, expect “The Dark Knight” to get a lot of love from neoconservative bloggers in the next few weeks. The Joker explains his past several times in the movie, but he changes his story with each telling. His is an evil that can’t be defined. It just is. And Batman is the judge and jury who must rein him in, employing a sophisticated surveillance system (just this once!) to accomplish his very necessary mission.

Of course, you can read the “The Dark Knight” on another level or enjoy it solely for its craftsmanship. Nolan shot six sequences of the film in Imax, and the work of cinematographer Wally Pfister is a marvel of clarity and depth. Nolan remains a hit-and-miss action choreographer, but he is a top-notch visual stylist capable of delivering stunning, iconic shots. (Ledger’s Joker — in disguise — walking away from a ticking time bomb is a study in perversity.)

The film ultimately falls just short in achieving its lofty ambitions, undone by a lack of connective tissue between scenes, a confusing action climax and a late-in-the-game character arc that feels somewhat rushed and arbitrary.

But Nolan never for a second veers from the movie’s dark tone and themes, and that kind of blinkered commitment is a rare find in a big-budget studio movie. And then there’s Ledger, losing himself under the greasepaint to such a degree that the finality of the performance doesn’t hit you until long after the movie ends. Man, he could act.