Batman's Worse Review Yet

Tuesday August 5 1:15 PM ET

Remember the name Rory Gibson, for he may well be the only person who can lay claim to having fallen asleep from boredom while watching The Dark Knight.

By FilmStew Staff, FilmStew.com

Among the journalistic duties performed by Rory Gibson of Australia's Courier-Mail newspaper is that of beer columnist for insert magazine The Good Life. His bio for the newspaper suggests that he "spends an inordinate amount of time researching the subject [of beer]," and certainly fans of The Dark Knight are going to assume he had a pint – or three – too many before taking in the box office busting Batman movie.

'It is way too long, way too boring and has a plot so convoluted it could only have been written by a dyslexic 12-year-old dosed up on Ritalin,' he writes on Monday, August 4th, revealing that he actually fell asleep at one point in the movie theater. 'When I woke up about half an hour later I honestly thought I had slept right through the movie and into the next screening session, because the story hadn't progressed.'

'The Joker was still blowing things up, and no one was doing anything concrete about it,' he continues. 'By my reckoning there were at least a dozen opportunities to put a bullet through his [the Joker's] brain and put us all out of our misery, but no, the film's director wanted us to suffer for almost three hours.'

Given the fact that the late Heath Ledger was born in Australia, it would seem almost a given that he would be afforded in this case automatic posthumous praise Down Under. But at press time, very surprisingly, nine of the 29 readers who had commented on the Gibson piece basically agreed with the writer's view of The Dark Knight, while a number of those taking him to task articulated the thought that he was deliberately being a contrarian just to attract attention.

'Sure, Heath Ledger makes a good Joker, but by keeping him on the screen for so long he ruined his good work,' Gibson concludes. 'Trust me, life is too short to waste time with this appalling movie.'