The Dark Knight / At the end of Batman Begins, Sergeant Gordon warns Gotham’s caped crusader about criminal escalation, and he wasn’t kidding. Forget everything you thought you knew about the Joker and Two-Face. In his sequel The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan uses the classic villains as springboards to ambitiously illustrate the blackest recesses of the human soul. It’s deep, bleak, heady stuff for the summer blockbuster season and to say that this is a simply comic-book adaptation is like pigeonholing The Godfather as the movie version of a gangster pulp novel.

In his final proper performance, Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker is an anarchic, homicidal vision of utter madness. Lapping his tongue like he has the foul taste of himself in his mouth, he blows up buildings, cuts people across the face with his many knives and threatens the “good” guys to make unspeakable moral choices of life and death. Whenever he appears on screen, there is a stomach-turning sense of anxiety–harm will come to someone. Nothing the actor has done before suggests the measures of random, terroristic evil the Joker exudes with his white-trash-gone-chaotic drawl. His version of the character will be lumped with Hannibal Lector as one of the iconic scary villains in contemporary cinema because it is something we haven’t seen before. But, he’s not the only award-worthy element of Knight. The movie itself should have a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.

It’s an ensemble crime drama reminiscent of Heat and L.A. Confidential with the massive, operatic scope of individual character arcs. Aaron Eckhart provides a version of Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent that should make Tommy Lee Jones ashamed of his juvenile maudlin posturing in Batman Forever. While the Joker appears as a catalyst to the proceedings, everything in this complex story relies on Dent with his symbolic campaign of hope and change. When he becomes Two-Face, his disfigurement isn’t purple and jokey, it’s a gory, scarred open wound–physical, emotional and even political–an image of the moral edge our elected leaders dance on for our approval, sometimes only kept in check by the flip of a coin. And that’s all there is to say because none of the avenues taken by the screenplay deserves to be spoiled.

All the returning actors are also given necessary storylines that strengthen the organic whole. Christian Bale is sturdy as our flawed hero and Michael Caine offers sympathetic, touching support as the wise butler who must eventually choose what not to tell his broken charge. Morgan Freeman in particular has an intriguing moral decision to make when he realizes the lengths Batman will go through to practice his surveillance of the Joker. Newcomer Maggie Gyllenhaal takes the originally superfluous Rachel Dawes love-interest character to a noble, shattering place Katie Holmes never would’ve been able to.

One feels sorry for the children in the toy section at Wal-Mart, excited at all the Batman hype. It’s almost cruel to send them into this film because it was not made for them. This is an adult drama that not only pushes the boundaries of its PG-13 rating with its violence, but also with its pacing as a tragedy. The tale is a black one; 152 minutes of engrossing dread. Batman Begins ended on a note of triumph and hope, but by the conclusion here, things are not optimistic.

Not that there aren’t moments of summer action orgasms on display. The much-publicized Bat-Pod’s entrance is not only thrilling but also witty in the reason it exists, and the action sequence culminates with a rousing vehicular duel with the cycle and an 18-wheel semi. In an extended subplot, Batman travels to Hong Kong to snatch a money launderer, and his flight between buildings is more wow-worthy than a similar sequence in the third Mission: Impossible.

As great as Batman Begins was, this follow-up works on an entirely superior level and makes everything before look like a WB afternoon cartoon. The Dark Knight is more than just a well-done superhero popcorn-er; it’s a seminal, devastating depiction of mythic and artful urban violence.

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