Weak

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2012)

--------- WARNING! ALSO CONTAINS SPOILER FOR THE DARK KNIGHT ----------
People are saying that The Dark Knight Rises is stupid compared to Nolan's other Batman films. I think that's unfair. The Dark Night was equally stupid, and Heath Ledger was its only salvation, kind of like how Jack Nicolson saved The Shining from being a turkey. Don't kid yourself. Imagine The Shining without him.
So I liked Batman Begins, and then hated The Dark Knight. Here's a few reasons why. - A variety of story threads that never really went anywhere interesting. - Bothering to create the whole Two Face back story only to kill him off before he did anything interesting as Two Face! - Increasingly fantastical hardware and general overuse of "Cool" effects (Especially the bat vision) - Emergence of terrible and generic Hollywood cheese – the thing with the bomb and the boat. An absolute behemoth of predictability. Agonising.
So on to the Dark Knight Rises, or Why Didn't They Just Make The Dark Knight Returns?
Much of the film felt like there was a real underlying desire to make the Dark Knight Returns. I can't help but wonder why they didn't. I mean the overall theme for Bruce Wayne is the same in the sense that it is about him trying to find a way to live without Batman. Did they think they could write a similar but better story than Frank Miller?
It happens all the time. A character that has survived on merit for decades in another medium is handed to a flavour of the month director and, rather than pick up one of the classic stories that has kept the thing alive for so long, that director decides that they know how to do it better. In reality they almost never do and in this case, just to rub salt in the wound, there are more than enough classic Batman stories to keep a credible Hollywood franchise ticking over forever.
Who cares anyway. There's so much wrong with the movie that it doesn't matter.
The need to up the anti on the gadget front went into overdrive here with a strange flying machine and a fusion reactor that was astonishingly easy to weaponize. So after making so much effort to ground this iteration of Batman in contemporary reality they suddenly revert to Adam West world with a nice big round bomb. (Which – in case you didn't know – some days you just cant get rid of.) Then there was the inmate in the prison who can punch a broken back better! I suppose that might have made sense to some people. It's like a musculoskeletal version of Homeopathy.
Also, the action sequences have become increasingly silly as this trilogy has progressed and there were some moments that were hard not to laugh at. The stadium sequence especially. This is a common problem when certain directors are given too much freedom. The third Lord Of The Rings movie is another recent example, and all the new Star Wars Movies, and the Matrix 2 & 3. Is there a pattern here? Trilogitis?
Roll out the mega cheese.
First Mathew Modine's character. We all knew he was going to have a heroic change of heart. Why? Because we've all seen that same shallow character do the same thing a hundred times before in a hundred other movies.
Then came the horribly telegraphed ending. Once Alfred made his speech about the café I spent the rest of the film trying to pretend it wasn't going to happen, but of course it did, I knew it would, and it was even worse than I expected it to be. Why? Well because, in addition to being a cheese fest of epic proportions, it made no sense in the context of the Batman character or the movie. Batman is kind of a functioning borderline sociopath with strong narcissistic qualities and it seems ludicrous that he would one day just settle down and live a normal life, with a career criminal that he barely knows. But it was only later that it annoyed me on that level.
So are he and Alfred never going to speak again?
That was what I thought while I watched it happen. I mean Alfred is like a father to Bruce Wayne. Are they really going to go their separate ways? After everything they've done together? Just because of something Alfred said that related to a different time in both their lives? An extraordinarily superficial attempt to engineer an emotional farewell.
Some people that I have talked to about this have said that I am emotionally limited. Paradoxically, I think the same about them. There are people who cry at the end of ET, and there are people who cry at the end of Brief Encounter. The two appear to be mutually exclusive.
Then there's Bane. I never liked Bane in the comics. He was silly. So it was quite a surprise to find myself watching a movie where Bane appeared as a genuinely menacing cult leader, and everything around him became increasingly laughable.
Then we have one of my pet hates, the Deus Ex Machina. In this movie it comes when Talia reveals her true identity. Much like Bane, I never really liked Ras Al Ghul or anything relating to him and his, but the Talia revelation annoyed me on a basic plot device level. I blame M. Night Shyamalan for popularising this sort of nonsense as being interesting or cleaver. Every time I see it happen my brain involuntarily adds an orchestral Dun Dun Dahhh.
The only positive here is that the movie looks great, but even that becomes a negative as you begin to accept that you are viewing a classic example of style over substance.
Favourite bit: The hijack of the plane, before it all started to get on my nerves.