Classic ranting bad guy makes classic mistake of ranting to long

Rating: 6/10 (8 August 2012)

Boy, Bane talks a lot. So of course he falls victim to that old cliché in the end, ranting far too much about how his ultimate victory will please him. He also falls victim to that cliché of being able to easily dispose of his only real threat and showing questionable reasoning in not doing so. In this case it's because he wants to torture Batman by making him watch CSPAN on an old TV ( its not even widescreen) but this eventually angers Batman who thinks of throwing a rock at the TV, thereby ending his torture and freeing him to pursue a fitness regiment created by the Russian version of Tony Little.
I can forgive all that of course, but the boredom of listening to Bane rant on and on talking in that silly mechanical voice that feels completely detached from his body is just distracting and ultimately coma inducing. Bane went from a bad ass, to an idiot, to total pussy, and back to an idiot throughout the course of the movie.
Sadly, Bane is probably the most interesting character in the movie. Catwoman was fun but I wouldn't call her interesting. Catwoman also vanishes mysteriously from the plot only to return when it's convenient for the script writers. This seems to happen to pretty much every character, time passes in the form of vanishings, we see one character but not the others and that's because time is passing. It doesn't quite work honestly, it makes the relevance of the characters diminish as the movie goes along until you really don't care for any of them.
The scale and scope was just too much for one movie. You could do a trilogy around this one movie, seriously, and it would be chock full of material. The scope of TDKR is Michael Bay-esque, it's epic on top of epic inside of epic on the most epic slab of epic you've ever seen.... Christopher Nolan has officially had a bit of a stumble.