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Heath’s JOKER Is Thrill Of The ‘KNIGHT’

Farewell Act An Oscar-Race WILD CARD

By SARA STEWART (NYPost)

Spoiler alert: This is not a review of the latest Batman installment, “The Dark Knight,” but don’t read on if you want to be totally surprised at the theater!

“You can’t let me go,” Heath Ledger’s psycho Joker character jeers at one point in “The Dark Knight” - and it’s true.

As Ledger’s final performance, this one is so off the rails that you really don’t want to say goodbye, to the character or the actor.

Director Chris Nolan’s latest installment of Batman, shown to a packed IMAX house Saturday in LA, made good on many of the amped-up promises touted in its trailers: cooler new toys, groundbreaking cinematography, a darker tone and the genesis of a villain named Two-Face.

But Ledger’s green-haired fiend overshadowed all of them, from the first moment he appeared onscreen to a burst of applause and cheers from the audience.

It’s hard not to wince a little when Ledger’s character gets going on the topic of death, as he frequently does. It’s been only six months since the actor was found dead from an accidental overdose in his SoHo pad.

Playing the Joker, slumped on the floor of a police interrogation room, his character explains that he prefers a knife as a murder weapon because it’s slower.

“In their last moments,” he says eerily, “people show you who they really are.”

In this flick, Ledger showed us what a masterful actor he was - certainly deserving of a posthumous Oscar nomination.

If he had a soundtrack, it would be something along the lines of the Sex Pistols, whose singer, Johnny Rotten, was cited by the actor as one of his inspirations for the role, along with Malcolm McDowell’s performance in “A Clockwork Orange.”

His puckered grin of a scar and cracked, sweat-smeared makeup are a punk-rock take on the original, purple-suited archnemesis.

Ledger developed a whole new body language for the character. His Joker’s tendency to lick his lips and blink extra slowly gives him, at times, the appearance of a demonic lizard.

He kills without a second thought and in the most artful of ways. Watch for his stomach-churning “magic trick” with a pencil, by way of introducing himself to a roomful of Gotham City’s most notorious villains.

Typical comic-book villains tie up a good guy or two in an easily escapable situation; this Joker induces citywide evacuations and enacts perverse “social experiments” that involve baiting Gotham City’s citizens to take one another’s lives.

But Ledger’s performance is hardly the only thrill in store for the audience.

Nolan’s unprecedented IMAX cinematography elicited an audible gasp during the film’s first sweeping shot, which soars in over the skyscrapers of Chicago and tosses you straight into the action.

Christian Bale is more brawny, and more tormented, than in “Batman Begins he spends a good deal of the movie trying to figure out how to not be Batman anymore.

Enter Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, the superstar district attorney who’s been dubbed the city’s “white knight” - in marked contrast to the black-suited superhero. Dent is also dating Wayne’s girl, Rachel Dawes, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes.

Other familiar faces - from “Batman Begins” and elsewhere - abound. Gary Oldman is back as Lt. James Gordon, and Michael Caine returns as Alfred the butler. Blink and you’ll miss Cillian Murphy, who pops up to reprise his role as the Scarecrow.

Eric Roberts is mob boss Maroni, the successor to Tom Wilkinson’s Falcone from the first film. Nestor Carbonell - a k a the man who doesn’t age on “Lost” - is the mayor of Gotham City. And Anthony Michael Hall shows up as a rather unlucky TV reporter.

In a welcome bit of levity, there’s also the banter between Bale and Morgan Freeman, as Wayne’s R&D man, Lucius Fox.

Are there deaths? Yes, and we’re not going to tell you who.

They come as a shock and push the plot into even darker territory. Did we mention it’s dark?

But make no mistake: This is Ledger’s show, and whenever he wasn’t around, the audience was palpably waiting for him to turn up again.

With this film’s complicated plot involving the mob and banks and Lt. Gordon’s SWAT teams, the Joker is the unglued glue that holds the thing together.

His confrontations with Batman are brutal and darkly funny and explore the freakish nature of the whole superhero shtick.

“You . . . complete me,” the Joker sneers to him at one point.

And it’s Ledger’s performance that clearly completes the movie.