Word: bruce
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...Bank Job Directed by Roger Donaldson; rated R; out July 15 Based on the 1971 robbery of a London bank, this savory heist film adds spicy photos of aristocrats to the haul. Jason Statham, ever the East End Bruce Willis, leads the amateur cracksmen as they get tangled in about 56 subplots involving MI5, good and bad cops, porn dealers, black radicals and jealous wives. A burly, burrowing pleasure...
...there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted. He knows what he is: an "agent of chaos." Your worst nightmare...
...assuming the role Katie Holmes had in the first film) and his hidden identity. So the Joker starts preying on Rachel, and he says he'll stop terrorizing Gotham if Batman will come out from under the mask. A modest request from the bin Laden of movie villains, yet Bruce is reluctant. Or rather, the film is, since the informing principle of any franchise is perpetuation of the series. No secret, no Batman - just a moneybags with a Messiah complex...
...strap-yourselves-in trip, handsome and assured as only a big-budget picture can be. (Part of it was shot in the IMAX process, which lends the action scenes a startling clarity and depth.) And for reassurance, Nolan brings back old friends from Batman Begins: Michael Caine as Bruce's butler Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Fox, who takes care of Bruce's toys...
...Actually, they're just diversions from the epochal face-off of Bruce and the Joker. For a good part of the film, when the two embrace in a free fall of souls - one doomed, the other imperiled - you may think you're in the grip of a mordant masterpiece. That feeling will pass, as the film spends too many of its final moments setting up the series' third installment. The chill will linger, though. The Dark Knight is bound to haunt you long after you've told yourself, Aah, it's only a comic-book movie...