As I spent last night watching The Dark Knight for the second time, it was apparent why it was one of the better films of 2008 — for all its Shakespearean overtones and Christopher Nolan’s astute direction, it’s really just a movie about a guy with a lot of fancy toys on a vigilante tear against drug dealers, mob bosses, and serial killers.

So then, just maybe, it’s some sort of action-flick hangover which has my mouth salivating over one of the Post’s front page stories today. James Spruill and his family were taken hostage by two masked gunmen on Friday. Spruill, a Metro maintenance worker, used some serious cunning to trick the gunmen into allowing all the members of the family to stay together during most of the ordeal. Spruill also has some serious manly bragging rights to deploy — after coolly attracting a police cruiser to his erratic driving without alerting the man holding a gun to his 11-year old son’s chest, he lunged into the back seat to subdue him, assisting the officer in his arrest.

The other masked man who stayed at the Spruill home is still at-large. The two assailants were apparently targeting Spruill’s wife, who works at a SunTrust bank in Silver Spring. The men’s plot was to use her as a bargaining chip in a planned robbery — Southern Maryland’s second such attempted plot in the last three months.

It’s a tense tale, one which could have obviously gone quite differently. So while there’s hope that Mr. Spruill never finds himself in a similar position again, his one-liner — “they were a bunch of amateurs” — probably could use a little bit of work. We’d highly suggest adapting one of these.

UPDATE: WTOP is reporting that a second man involved in the plot has now been apprehended and arrested.