It's good for sure, perhaps even really good although i think a few more viewings might be needed to decide. What really comes across in this moreso than in Batman Begins is scale and grit. By scale i'm thinking of scenes like the hospital being blown up (and that's not much of a spoiler before you think i've spoiled something... and anyway they did actually blow up the building for the film, so it looks awesome) and the traffic piled up on the roads trying to get out of Gotham. Then there's the grit. Batman was quite nice in batman Begins - he goes off learns ninja uses his money to make a cool suit beats up bad guys and falls in love; here he kicks the shit out of the joker. It's not just batman though, the magic trick The Joker does with a pencil is funny and nasty all at the same time, same for the demonstration of how he got his looks. And a guy gets hit by a bus early on. Which for me makes for some good no-brainer entertainment, and that's the problem. When the film tries to suggest it's alright to torture bad guys to save good people it feels tacked on, clumsily, distractingly so - this is a comic book film not a fuckin polemic. And even then, when people are being beaten up and the Joker is being just plain evil, the film stops at the pg level of offscreen violence. I reckon it would have been much stronger, darker and more powerful if the violence was onscreen in your face where you cant pretend you didn't just see that. To keep that PG rating the film goes only so far then stops short of the mark, repeatedly, although i guess the filmmakers wanted to get the biggest audience possible without too much compromising, so the balance almost works to a reasonable extent. I havent even mentioned Ledger yet, well that's because he is good - but only because his character is the only one with something to it, the only one that's interesting and has any decent lines (the stuff between Batman, Dent and George about heroes deserved and needed seems really lame mostly), i liked the performance - the flicks of the tongue and other mannerisms were great but i think its as much down to the writing as Ledger's performance itself. He'll definitely get an oscar for it. Oh, a final thought, the film ends about three times - a bit like LOTR: Return Of The King; why cant films end these days without 3 or 4 epilogues? 7/10