BusyCowboy

The latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, has prompted a wave of complaints that it is too violent for its 12A certificate.

Seventy complaints have been received by the British Board of Film Classification in little over a week since its release.

Parents have told the BBFC that they had to cover their children’s eyes at scenes including one in which a man’s eye is jabbed with a pencil.

Others have shielded their children from a segment in which the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, tells how he enjoys knifing people because they take longer to die.

Some film critics have been suggesting for a long time that the 12A certificate - which means children of 12 can attend unaccompanied and younger children can be accompanied by their parents - is wrongly applied.

Many parents appear to have been surprised at the occasionally brutal tone of the film, which is closer to the dark violence of the original graphic novels than some of Batman’s more light-hearted adaptations.

The BBFC states that the film “contains moderate violence and sustained threat”.

However, Labour MP Keith Vaz, who is chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, said he would require the BBFC to attend its hearings on knife crime later this year.

The MP, who saw the film last Friday, said: “There are scenes of gratuitous violence in The Dark Knight to which I would certainly not take my 11-year-old daughter.”