The latest flick in the Batman franchise is a cut above the rest and finally relegates the memory of the egregious George Clooney/Arnold Schwarzenegger ice-capade to B-movie oblivion. The Dark Knight is top-notch urban gothic that will also keep the DC fans and the action nuts happy. It is especially pleasing to see that Warner Bros has taken the trouble to invest in a good quality script with plenty of twists and well-developed characters as well as the requisite big-name actors, special effects, cars to smash and buildings to crunch.

A new player has pulled up a chair to Gotham City’s blackjack table, but the Joker is in the game for the fun, not the money. First he takes on the mob, then new district attorney Harvey Dent and finally Batman, upping the stakes as he goes. Seeing Dent as a potential white knight for Gotham, Bruce Wayne wonders whether he might be able to hang up the bat cape and live a ‘normal’ life with the woman he loves at his side.

The cast list has an embarrassment of riches. Christian Bale makes a suitably dark and conflicted Caped Crusader and Maggie Gyllenhaal as love interest Rachel is a huge improvement on Katie Holmes, who wandered through the role in Batman Begins. Michael Caine as ‘butler’ Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Batman’s Q-esque gadget man are under-used in their relatively minor roles, while habitual villain Gary Oldman is virtually unrecognisable cast against type as Lieutenant Gordon. But it was always going to be Heath Ledger who made this film his own. Forget Jack Nicholson: Ledger is The Joker, channelling darkness and chaos to perfection with tics and tongue-flicks, wild eyes and loopy laughter. Only seen out of his clown make-up for a few seconds, he makes the viewer forget he ever played another role.

At just over two hours, The Dark Knight is packed with action. It looks slick and sounds great with its sinister, menacing soundtrack. Sadly, and almost inevitably, propaganda finds its way into this film as it has with so many Hollywood blockbusters since September 11. Batman standing on the smoking ruin of a building cannot help but recall Ground Zero and there are subtle, infrequent references to The Joker as “a terrorist”. It is mildly annoying, but thankfully not heavy-handed enough to take away too much from the film or from Ledger’s excellent performance.