As I write this, 208 reviews of The Dark Knight have been tallied at Rotten Tomatoes, and 196 of them are positive. In fact, the film's average score is 8.5 out of 10, suggesting that most critics don't just like it, they really, really like it.

And then there are those other 12 reviews. The negative reviews. The dirty dozen who dared to claim that The Dark Knight -- the greatest film in the history of the medium, the finest collaboration of performers and technicians since the dawn of time -- was anything less than divine perfection.

Who are these blasphemers? How dare they spout such impious nonsense about a film that has been known to heal lepers and give the blind their sight? Or, to paraphrase the semi-literate malcontents who post comments at the increasingly garish Rotten Tomatoes, YOU SUCK **** AND UR FULL OF **** AND I HOPE YOU DIE.

Yes, while a certain class of basement-dwelling, underemployed, post-adolescent geeks have always commented angrily on Rotten Tomatoes reviews with which they disagreed, the venomous responses to the Dark Knight pans were off the charts. The reviews first hit RT last Monday, and instantly the critics who disliked the film were bombarded with death wishes, personal invective, and the sort of general abuse usually reserved for people who commit heinous acts against your family, not who simply disagreed with you about a movie. And bear in mind, very few of these angry commenters had actually seen the film yet. They were furious that someone didn't like a movie that they only thought they were going to like.

It is a curious coincidence that eight of the 12 bad reviews, including the first four to go online, came from critics based in New York City. Among the fanboys desperate to dismiss the negative reviews as unreliable, this was the cause of much conspiracy-theorizing. They must have gotten together and made a pact to pretend to hate the film! They're all just jealous because the film was shot in Chicago, not their precious Big Apple! Those are two theories, apparently held with some conviction, that were frequently cited on the messages boards at Rotten Tomatoes and elsewhere.

This is grasping at straws, of course. Sometimes we hold opinions so strongly that we cannot fathom someone disagreeing with us, and so we look for ulterior motives or flaws in their argument -- something to help us justify ignoring the minority report. (Example: I love Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream with all my soul. When my friend told me she couldn't stand it, I thought, Ah, yes -- but then again, her parents divorced when she was young, and she has mild epilepsy. So you can't take her seriously on anything.) Films shot in Chicago get good reviews from New York critics all the time. And while eight of the bad reviews came from New York, let's not forget that at least 30 of the positive reviews came from New York, too. Apparently that conspiracy meeting wasn't very well attended.

No, my friends, when a critic says he didn't like a movie, the likeliest explanation is that he, you know, didn't like the movie. If he's a good critic, his review will explain what his reasons are. (If you read the review and still don't know what the critic didn't like about it, then that's a bad critic.) You can report that your experience with the film was different, but you're on shaky ground when you assert that the critic didn't really feel that way -- and I suspect you'd be pretty defensive if someone pulled the same maneuver on you, insisting that you only loved The Dark Knight because you convinced yourself in advance that it was going to be good, or that you're easily suckered by hype, or that you have poor taste in movies. (See? It's infuriating, isn't it?!)

Browsing the RT message boards, I see a few people willing to accept the idea of bad reviews, but with certain restrictions. There's a lot of this: I can believe that a hypothetical bad review could be worthy of my attention. But none of these actual negative reviews are worthwhile, because they are all (take your pick): badly written; poorly argued; pretentious; written by someone with a chip on his shoulder. Which is sort of like saying, "I'm not anti-Semitic! I'm sure there are lots of Jews who are fine people! Just none of the ones I happen to know."

That being said, I think a few of the negative reviews of The Dark Knight are genuinely useless. One of them is only 10 sentences long and barely skims the surface of the film, basically boiling down to "It's too dark! I want comic book movies to be more fun! Batman bemoans his fate too much!" The thing is, I wouldn't take this particular critic or his publication very seriously if he had loved the movie, either. In fact, a lot of the rave reviews are amateurish and superficial. Those critics aren't "good critics" just because they fall among the majority. Some of them are still lousy writers.

One of the naysayers is David Denby of The New Yorker. Say what you will about his taste in movies, the guy's a good writer. Furthermore, in terms of overall literary excellence, The New Yorker is one of the most respected publications in America. That doesn't mean Denby is automatically a great critic, or that he makes good points in this particular review (though I think both statements are true). But it does mean that knee-jerk reactions like "Who cares what The New Yorker says anyway??" or "This guy is a terrible writer!!" are laughably hollow.

I loved The Dark Knight. And if someone tells me they didn't like it, I'll think, "Wow, really? Huh." But I'm not going to psychoanalyze him or scrutinize his motives in search of a reason to dismiss his views. If another critic says this film was too oppressively dark, or that its philosophizing rang false, or that the action scenes were too chaotic (and those seem to be the most common complaints), so what? It didn't have that effect on me, but that doesn't mean I'm "right" and the other critics are "wrong." Believe it or not, it really is possible for two people to see the same movie and come out of it with entirely opposite impressions. It's also possible to disagree with someone without wanting him to die in a fire. Crazy, I know, but it's true.

* * * * *

Eric D. Snider only wants one class of people to die in a fire: those who don't know the difference between "your" and "you're."

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