LOS ANGELES'The trailers for The Dark Knight have shown quite a bit of Heath Ledger's scabbier, surlier reinvention of the Joker (think of Malcolm McDowell's thug from A Clockwork Orange but with kelp-coloured hair, scars and a hyena laugh), but the producers have been keeping the film's other Batman bad guy, Two-Face, under wraps.

"That's right, people don't really know yet," actor Aaron Eckhart said. "I can tell you that, basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stomach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me. It's like you would feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been ripped off or burned off with acid. I can't talk about it beyond that because I don't want to give away too much of the plans by Chris."

Chris is Christopher Nolan, director of Batman Begins, the acclaimed 2005 franchise reboot, and of The Dark Knight, the sequel that hits theatres July 18 with a tale that looks far darker and more psychological than the other superhero fare this summer. The darkness goes beyond the screen; 28-year-old Ledger died in January after an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

The death of Ledger and word of his performance have made him the natural focus of early coverage of The Dark Knight. But Nolan told the Los Angeles Times this year that the foundation of the film is the transformation of Eckhart's Harvey Dent from a crusading Gotham City prosecutor to Two-Face, a maniac whose face is ravaged on one side by a horrible injury.

On the campy 1960s Batman television series, the writers imported pretty much every major villain from the namesake comic book ' the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman, etc. ' but not Two-Face. He was simply too gross. In the comic books, the wounds come from acid thrown at the lawyer by a gangster on the witness stand, but there are hints that in this film it might be the Joker who is responsible for the scars.

Two-Face in the film is more a vigilante hunting down the Joker than he is a criminal, as he has most often been portrayed. His trademark is flipping a two-headed coin, one side defaced, the other pristine, and letting its landing determine his actions, often in situations where he has a gun to someone's head.

"The difference between Batman and Two-Face is how far they are willing to go and how they make their point," Eckhart said. "Otherwise, we're talking about vigilante crime-fighting. That's what Batman is all about. He has a strong sense of justice. And Harvey Dent has an extremely strong sense of justice. His fianc??e is killed. He's horribly injured. But he is still true to himself. He's a crime fighter, he's not killing good people. He's not a bad guy, not purely."

The 40-year-old Eckhart has a history of playing authority figures pulled away from the bright path. He was a cop on a path to destruction in The Black Dahlia, the slick tobacco lobbyist in Thank You for Smoking, the junior executive looking to punish women in In the Company of Men, all roles in which bad deeds are simple to see, but bad men are hard to recognize.

Meanwhile, with word that Nolan's Batman reboot will be back for a third instalment, it's an open question who will be his next villain. In public comments, he has said he isn't a fan of the Penguin character, and Catwoman was declawed not too long ago in the Halle Berry film fiasco. Maybe that means Gotham's protector will be solving dangerous riddles a few summers from now.

Los Angeles Times

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