By SARA STEWART
Last updated: 11:55 am
June 30, 2008
Posted: 2:51 am
June 30, 2008
Spoiler alert: This is not a review of the latest Batman installment, "The Dark Knight," but don't read on if you want to be totally surprised at the theater!
"You can't let me go," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker character jeers at one point in "The Dark Knight" - and it's true.
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As Ledger's final performance, this one is so off the rails that you really don't want to say goodbye, to the character or the actor.
Director Chris Nolan's latest installment of Batman, shown to a packed IMAX house Saturday in LA, made good on many of the amped-up promises touted in its trailers: cooler new toys, groundbreaking cinematography, a darker tone and the genesis of a villain named Two-Face.
But Ledger's green-haired fiend overshadowed all of them, from the first moment he appeared onscreen to a burst of applause and cheers from the audience.
It's hard not to wince a little when Ledger's character gets going on the topic of death, as he frequently does. It's been only six months since the actor was found dead from an accidental overdose in his SoHo pad.
Playing the Joker, slumped on the floor of a police interrogation room, his character explains that he prefers a knife as a murder weapon because it's slower.
"In their last moments," he says eerily, "people show you who they really are."
In this flick, Ledger showed us what a masterful actor he was - certainly deserving of a posthumous Oscar nomination.
If he had a soundtrack, it would be something along the lines of the Sex Pistols, whose singer, Johnny Rotten, was cited by the actor as one of his inspirations for the role, along with Malcolm McDowell's performance in "A Clockwork Orange."
His puckered grin of a scar and cracked, sweat-smeared makeup are a punk-rock take on the original, purple-suited archnemesis.
Ledger developed a whole new body language for the character. His Joker's tendency to lick his lips and blink extra slowly gives him, at times, the appearance of a demonic lizard.
