In many ways, it's the feel-bad movie of the summer: it's hard not to stare into Ledger's eyes and come away profoundly shaken. Though in the end good emerges at least slightly victorious -- a temporary armistice against the forces of darkness -- it's one of the least happy endings for a mainstream American action movie in quite a while.
That unsettling conclusion will find its mirror in another 7 months, when Ledger will undoubtedly win a posthumous Oscar for his work, and be praised with warm, loving, shallow adjectives that will likely have very little to do with the work he offered onscreen. But the performance will long outlive the praise. It is strange, idiosyncratic, compelling, hilarious, and horrifying, and it is now his legacy.