When Christian Bale roughed his voice a bit in his scenes as Batman in “Batman Begins”, it was authentically cool because he didn’t take it over the top.  He did it just rough enough so as to disguise his voice and add a menacing appeal.  When he did it in The Dark Night, however, it transitioned into the realm of the ludicrous.

I swear at some moments it was so try-hard that I saw spit coming out of his mouth.  If hiding his voice was so key, why not introduce a device into his costume, perhaps around his neck, which would help mask his voice?  The writers seemed perfectly OK to introduce the notion of 30 million cell phones all of a sudden becoming real-time 3D sonar devices, why not make the need for a rediculous raspy voice moot by introducing a device to handle it?