I have to admit, I am still slightly appalled with myself for buying into the hype and dragging my butt to see this movie in the first place. But it was half-price Tuesdays at The Notting Hill Coronet and at least that way I’d avoid the screeching kids shuffling into the local Multiplex, or the low-slung teens sucking their teeth between elongated drool-spits onto the sticky purple-carpeted floor while burbling constantly into their mobile phones. 

The Coronet is a last throwback to another era of cinema-going. The seats are rickety cast-offs in red velvet which rock back and forth but at least they give leg room. The screen is too small for the film itself, a line of light spilling over the bottom lip, but the room has a balcony. Hey, it almost feels majestic.

So I settle back. The place is pretty busy for a Tuesday afternoon. Schools are out for the summer but there are as many young men in their twenties as there are kids. The picture begins with a sheet of rolling blue flame coming towards the camera. I have no idea why because within moments we’re in a blandly shot city, no doubt supposed to be New York. There’s a bank robbery taking place. The robbers are wearing scary clown masks. There’s no sense of who’s leading this gang but they shoot very noisy guns. The music is pounding. It’s violent, mindlessly violent. The type of violence where the shooter kills his victim without looking at his target... the death usually accompanied by a dry quip. The film has a 12A certificate.

Then the gang start killing each other. Greed is good. Less of you means more for me, industrial lay-offs in full effect. There’s bound to be one man left standing and sure enough it’s golden-boy Ledger, the main reason some people are saying the film has been treated with kid gloves by the critics and is doing such phenomenal business. Ledger looks good. A freak. White powder smeared over his face, black rings around his eyes, a slash of badly-applied red-lipstick around his mouth and some bubbly scar tissue on each cheek. He makes a good baddie. Until he starts acting.

Immediately you realise why actors love these kind of roles. The restraints are off. They can go for it. Fly. Indulge. Show-off. And being allowed to show-off is of course why they became actors in the first place. If only Mom and Pop had showed them just an ickle more love.

So Heath starts to act. He wobbles, he shakes, he licks, he pouts. He’s like Uncle Fester on steroids, juiced up like an athlete sneaking out of a hotel room, the prick of the needle still burning. 

We sit back and watch. Ledger’s messing with The Mob. He’s got Italians, Russians, Chinese and super-fly Niggas all spinning on his dick - the biggest bad guys in New York and looney tunes has them dancing.

So what’s he doing it for? Vengeance, pain, money? It’s unclear. He just wants to smash things up. He runs a massive and unending army of mask-wearing cohorts who must be getting paid but The Joker, as we now know him to be thanks to the playing cards he liberally tosses about the place, doesn’t seem to care much about money. Money can't buy him you know what.

What he really wants is The Batman. Reasons unclear. Guess he just doesn’t like the guy. And should he get his hands on The Caped Crusader he wants the dude to take off his mask... to reveal himself.  I wasn’t quite sure why this was so personally important but hey, everyone has to have an agenda.

Meanwhile, and you just knew there had to be a ‘meanwhile’, the District Attorney, blonde-looker Harvey Dent played by some artsy-fart actor who was once in a film about beating-up on a blind woman, is doing his best to clean up the streets of Gotham... which essentially means The Joker as Batman has put the fear of God into all the other suckers. Harvey is also balling some chick called Rachel, Maggie Gyllenhal, who permanently looks like she's been hit with a frying pan... hell, the D.A. is prettier than his girlfriend!... No matter, he’s in love.

Problem is, so is somebody else.

You got it... Batman. Rachel is his ex. She knows who he is and wants nothing to do with some introspective freak who spends his nights dressed in rubber.

So, Batman... rather, Bruce Wayne... what’s been going on with him since his last outing? 

Well he’s moved from Wayne Manor and is now living in some vast Condenast wankpad somewhere high above the streets of Manhattan. His company is debating whether to deal with some Chinese money-man based in Hong Kong - a man we have already seen is tied up with the Mobsters. Wayne himself is in an almighty grump. His outfits are beginning to suck and he keeps getting bitten by dogs. What's worse, his girl has left him for the D.A. although he comforts himself with a super-hot Russian ballerina and later three models tricked out like Christy, Helena and Linda in Versace knock-offs. Nevertheless, the strangely sexless Bale is tired of being a super-hero. Our leading man is mopey, broody, and, way ahead of the rest of us, wants out of this movie right from the start.

So there’s your set-up. What happens next is The Joker rampaging through the streets of Gotham, blowing up shit and whining about his Dad. He steals all the bad guys’ money - which the Chinese dude thought he was moving out of the country - and then sets fire to it. He kidnaps Harvey Dent and the ugly chick Rachel after a tediously protracted truck chase. He ties them to a bunch of oil cans and says who ever gets saved first, lives. He then dresses up as a nurse and blows up an empty Gotham Central Hospital clearly located somewhere deep in the suburbs. He also bribes cops whose mothers can't afford Medicare.

The main cop, Gary Oldman, sporting a Geraldo-moustache and retro specs, gets to Rachel. But Batman gets to Dent first. Or was it the other way round? For the life of me I can’t remember, it was so damn dark and confusing. Anyway the chick buys it. Dent’s face catches fire and, refusing skin grafts or surgery, he turns into another villain, this one called Two-Face, looking much like Damien Hirst’s ‘Hymn’, a lamer version of Chigurh from ’No Country for Old Men’ who decides everything on a toss of a coin, except in Two-Face’s world he just keeps tossing ‘til someone dies (which in some ways seems an apt metaphor for the movie).

While all this is taking place, Morgan Freeman mooches about as a version of Q - making a new suit for the Bat guy - “Try and concentrate, Bond” - and a sonar phone - “You mean like Radar?” - which enables his employer to digitally see through walls. This causes Freeman to have a crisis of conscience - a stab at the invasiveness of Homeland Security - and he tenders his resignation. Not surprisingly he wants out of this franchise too.

Percolating this daft farrago of nonsense is Michael Caine as a member of the serving class dispensing cockney words of wisdom to his charge - “How’s yer Father, Apples and Pears, I hate the French” etc...

The story ends with Batman killing the D.A./Harvey Dent/Two-Face so that Gary Oldman can declare the same man a hero. (Oldman, now Commissioner Gordon, has already faked his own death, freaking out his wife and family in order to... protect them?)

My own personal favourite “How the hell did he do that?” is when The Joker - interrogated in an underground bunker at Police HQ by a nameless cop who keeps turning up and is played neither by a recognisable actor or one of any charm - somehow manages to escape from an electrically bolted interrogation room and make his way past the massed ranks of heavily-armed members of New York's finest wielding no more than a pocket-knife. Maybe they loved him for earlier killing their boss. They got a day off work for the guy's funeral after all.

Despite this barrage of illogical nonsense there is some fun to be had in watching the director Christopher Nolan take swipes at recent American history - from Batman standing amongst the rubble of Ground Zero, to prisoners being sprung from their cells as in Hurricane Katrina - it’s all in there if you're still awake to notice.

Some have said The Joker represents some Bin Laden figure - creating chaos for chaos's sake. But Bin laden has a clear goal, to re-establish a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate. The mad Mullah, however misguided, has a clear sense of purpose.

If anything it’s the movie itself which ends up most slavishly following the Joker’s raison d'etre. 

Personally I'm looking forward to finding out in the next one if Batman can get any grumpier? He's like his audience, teenage boys sulking in their rooms, and playing with their gadgets.

At least I hope he gets over his strep throat.