Why so serious?

Caught "The Dark Knight" last week. Despite the critical praise and word of mouth hype, I found myself feeling let down. This rare dissenting review sums up why:

The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
...
But the psychological twists in The Dark Knight—especially the transformation of Dent into “Two-Face”—are baffling as drama. They play as if they’d been penned by Oxford philosophy majors trying to tone up a piece of American pop—to turn it into an uncivil Shavian dialogue, Don Juan in Hell with mutilations and truck crashes.

Oh, the verbiage probably wouldn’t matter if those truck crashes were any fun, but the tumult is spectacularly incoherent. Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action. He got away with the chopped-up fights in Batman Begins because his hero was a barely glimpsed ninja, coming at villains from all angles in stroboscopic flashes. There are more variables here, which means more opportunities to say “What the f--- just happened?”

That pretty much covers it. Even Heath Ledger's much ballyhooed final performance as The Joker disappoints: it's good, but I was surprised at how limited his screen time was. The film felt overstuffed: too many characters (making the Harvey Dent/Two Face plot line the linchpin of the story was a fatal mistake), too much expository dialogue and superfluous action sequences (the bit where Batman goes to China was completely uneccesary). Maybe it's the fact that moviegoers today are forced to shell out $12 for a matinée, and thus demand more bang for their buck. A shame that seems to translate into such bloated and incoherent products.