Hey, have you heard about this Batman movie? It's pretty good. (This is an employment of understatement for humorous intent.)

Since time immemorial, big-budget summer action flicks are not supposed to approach the realm of art - in fact, that's antithetical to what they're supposed to do, and is even considered something of an albatross when it comes to their box-office potential (think, for example, of how "Blade Runner" did initially). And if they're based on comic books - well, grandiose ambitions are nice, but they don't pay the bills.

And so along comes "The Dark Knight" to pulverize everything you've ever assumed about Hollywood. It's better than the goodest good you'd ever expect from a movie like this.

(Since "pod" has become a cool tech word of late, here's the Bat-Pod.)

So here's the story (more or less - oh, and hey, there's actually kind of a spoiler in here, so be warned): This Batman guy has become a sort of good news/bad news phenomenon in Gotham City - he's rid the streets of petty crime, but, on the other hand, he's inspired a new breed of steroidal villain to try their hand at wreaking havoc in town. Mainly, this comes in the form of the Joker, who has been driven utterly mad due to the fact that in the past he had been portrayed by actors happy to ham it up for cheese's sake but now he's being played by this charismatically handsome artiste who has a just unbelievably astounding range and is stealing every scene he's in without overacting but actually doing some really intensely nuanced work and so that paradox has driven him to a murderous rage matched only by his ingenious ability to have just about everyone in sight killed, and even though he's the puppet-master, the blood tends to be on somebody else's hands. Which, you know, only underscores his perversity.

And Batman's so obsessed with his mission that he hasn't even noticed that his ex-girlfriend has been replaced by an actual actress instead of a starlet, but he's still kind of conflicted about the fact that she's dating a hotshot D.A. named Harvey Dent, whose fate all the reviews seem circumspect about revealing even though if you read the comic books as a kid you know exactly what's gonna happen to him.

Oh, and Morgan Freeman plays the Morgan Freeman Character.

So, two things: The film does a heroic job of showing exactly what would happen in reality if super-heroes actually did exist, and even though I think that's kind of a stupid conceit on its face (since, after all, superheroes in fact don't exist, because there's enough Lycra in our world as it is), both this and Alan Moore's graphic novel "Watchmen" prove me definitively wrong, while I can't think of any entertainments that have really tried to explore that conceit and failed. So, there's that.

And secondly, any thoughts that Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker has been elevated to some sort of sentimental mythical status since his untimely death will end as soon as you see the movie. Put it this way: He makes Jack Nicholson look like some sort of dinner-theater hack. Though his deadpan sadism and the disturbing-yes-and-almost-poignant way he rolls his tongue restlessly about his mouth may not win him a posthumous Oscar (certainly, some film with far nobler intentions will have a well-played character who's Gandhi's best friend), if there is another performance that's as galvanizingly memorable at year's end, this'll have been a very good year for movies. (All the other actors are good, too, but they're still alive so we don't have to moon over them.)

Oh, and the action sequences are crazy bitchen, too.

And, hey, here's a rare bit of actually helpful consumer information for you: If you have kids around age 10 or so, don't take them to see it in the IMAX format - it's way too intense. Take them to the movie on a regular screen, but see it for yourself in IMAX. Will you be blown away? Hey, the Joker pretty much blows everyone else away in the film, so why not you?