So what you do is go to see "The Dark Knight," and then leave after two hours -- just after the first ending.

Do that, and you'll see one of the better movies of the year.

"The Dark Knight," like "Iron Man," shows that comic-book movies can be made with thought and care. Until the last half-hour. It shows that the characters can be complex and conflicted, nuanced and credible. Until the last half-hour.

Once again, Gotham City is in an upheaval (the filmmakers didn't even try to disguise Chicago, which is odd). Crime has virtually taken over, and the Caped Crusader's efforts to rid the streets of criminals have him branded, with some justification, as an outlaw vigilante.

The Dynamic Single has help from perhaps the only two uncorrupt officials in town: Police Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Dent's efforts in particular have gone a long way in making the city safer, so much so that Batman is thinking of hanging up his frankly bizarre costume.

An additional motivation for retirement is that the current love of his life, (Maggie Gyllenhaal in the Katie Holmes role) has vowed to get back together with his secret identity Bruce Wayne if he goes back to being an ordinary billionaire again. At the moment, though, she is dating none other than Harvey Dent.

This classic setup is complicated by the appearance of a worthy supervillain, the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger. Every good hero needs a good villain, and Ledger provides it -- he acts with his eyes and his tongue -- until the last half-hour. Deformed by scars on his cheeks he got for reasons he keeps inventing, the Joker is an old-school psychopathic villain who craves anarchy for the sheer twisted fun of it.

Writer Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote "The Prestige" and wrote the original story for "Memento," adds to this plot a heady dose of moral ambiguity. This Batman is a sadist, or at least a violent pragmatist, and he is certainly willing to contemplate murder. The other characters tend to beat and kill people, too (the PG-13 rating is a farce), but Batman is unusually unstable for a superhero.

It is a role Christian Bale melts into, a rare occasion in which his generally stiff acting style becomes an attribute, indicating an emotional distance. The part fits him, except when he tries to put on a gruff voice for Batman, which is kind of funny.

Director Christopher Nolan (Jonathan's brother, and the director of "The Prestige" and "Memento") searches for the dark recesses of the story and characters, creating a mood of pervasive oppression. It's fine film-making, if you don't mind the camera circling around the characters every single chance it gets, as it did at the end of "The 400 Blows" and "A Man and a Woman." 

But then, "The Dark Knight" borrows its ideas from any number of movies. It takes Thomas Mitchell's coin from "Only Angels Have Wings," and Lotte Lenya's shoes from "From Russia With Love," Javier Bardem's coin-toss of fate from "No Country for Old Men" and, frankly, parts of Jack Nicholson's Joker from "Batman." 

And to be perfectly honest, the Nolans tend to recycle the same ideas over and over again in this film. If Christopher Nolan shatters one pane of glass, he shatters them all. He flips perhaps a dozen cars into the air, often for reasons that don't make physical sense. His characters fall down the outside of buildings with a frightening regularity.
And he stages explosions so often they lose their visual excitement. 

But that isn't the problem with the last half-hour. The problem with the last half-hour is that movie builds up to its natural climax, which occurs around the two-hour mark, and then it keeps going. Everything after that first ending feels unnecessarily tacked on, especially when it spins off into peculiar directions. 

The story, which until then makes sense, becomes considerably less comprehensible.
Cross-cutting between scenes is handled ineptly. The performers suddenly begin to overact. Character motivations change.

And worst of all for a comic-book movie, the pace drags and it becomes dull. Even the Joker becomes tiresome. 

You'd be better off missing the last 30 minutes. If you leave when you first feel like you should, the experience will be nothing but terrific.

Contact Daniel Neman at (804) 649-6408 or dneman@timesdispatch.com.