The latest installment of the Batman series, “The Dark Knight,” accomplished the remarkable feat of raking in about as many positive critical reviews as it did money. And the movie, if you missed it, took in a few boatloads of cash.

I expected the financial success, but I’m a bit puzzled by the critical enthusiasm over the film.

Shortly after its release, Rottentomatoes.com — a Web site that consolidates the movie reviews of most major film critics — posted a special feature exploring whether the film was a “masterpiece.” There are, indeed, enough reviews on the Web site proclaiming as much.

I saw the movie, and that degree of praise seems a bit hasty. I thought “The Dark Knight” was a good movie with at least one very good performance and several other inoffensive ones.

But a masterpiece?

Masterpieces, in my mind, are those films that transform the way we think about movies and the way we watch them. Masterpieces challenge our understanding of cinema, the way it works or the way it can work.

Masterpieces, for me, are rhetorically complete. They are virtually flawless, or the flaws they contain are dwarfed by the power of their successes.

And it typically takes me more than two days before proclaiming a film a masterpiece.

“The Dark Knight” was an entertaining movie, but it was also bloated and occasionally sloppy. And I can’t imagine the film’s enduring legacy as being anything other than one of Heath Ledger’s last films.
To call the film a masterpiece is hasty and, in my eyes, lazy.

If this is a masterpiece, when will we know when we see one for real?