Which goes to show that there's still plenty of creativity to be had while following classic structure, and proving once again that broad ideas are meaningless and execution is everything.
I think that's a reasonably defensible statement - http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-dark-knight.
"regarded by many as the greatest "action" movie of all time" means just what it says. I never claimed nor even implied that the view was authoritative simply because it was widely held.
(As an aside the article itself never criticizes Dark Knight for being poor only for being formulaic).
Far from it; action films are extremely interesting from an artistic POV because they are often so uncontrived that they offer an unusually direct insight into the society that made them. John McTiernan's Predator is a superb film, for example - it's 30 years old and still plays well on TV or the big screen.
Granted, that's vague, but certainly among people I know, The Dark Knight is considered the high water mark of modern action films.
And while this still is just more anecdotal data and not scientific proof, the movie sits at #6 on imdb's list of top 250 movies of all time:
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top?ref_=nb_mv_3_chttp
Which suggests strongly that this view is shared more widely in the general movie-watching population.