Fantastic film, but worst of the three

Rating: 8/10 (21 August 2012)

Just came back from finally watching this. Huge fan of the first two but this disappointed me.

tahlia twist seemed too out of the blue. not enough emphasis was placed on the league of shadows's reasoning for wanting gotham gone. this was covered in the first film but as it is such a central part of this film, it felt wrong that the contrast between the two ideologies was so poorly explored, thus denying any weight behind the twist. Bane may have let slip some amazing lines but; - bane's voice is too difficult to understand. i know they cleared his voice up following earlier previews, and i understood the vast majority of what he said. but in a film like this i want to be able to hear every single word. this isn't the kind of film where any dialogue should be missed. i would have been annoyed if i couldn't hear certain things the joker said in the dark knight, however i'll admit to being less annoyed as i would have been as - the dialogue just isn't as awe inspiring as previous films. characters did their bit, went from here to there, moved the story along. every now and then you'd get something interesting but not like in the dark knight, where every minute or two contained quotable dialogue with some kind of well written philosophical notion that made the story more profound. that really didn't seem to happen here. it was so much less mentally engaging on that level than the other two films. yes the storyline kept you on your toes just as much as TDK, but lost a crucial dimension.

i'd say this film is clearly the worst of the trilogy, but is still a good film. i'd say its the return of the jedi of the nolan batmans in terms of quality, with TDK being empire strikes back.
ultimately i feel nolan hedged his bets on bane being an excellent villain. which is a shame as having an expressionless, unrelatable, hard to understand beefcake is always going to bad against the joker. i don't think this would have been so bad if all the talk of bane's 'incredible fighting style' was properly shown in the film. this could perhaps have made up for it all. but the fighting needed to be more visceral, something we'd never seen before. we got that with ledger's acting, so i was hoping for that with hardy's fighting. just nope. he was menacing for sure, and he looked strong and quite scary. it served the storyline. but as a main villain that was obviously going to be compared to the joker in terms of how entertaining he was to watch, bane came up SO short.
lastly, i am glad nolan made the film as it wasn't bad at all, but it didn't feel like a nolan film. he has such an attention to detail which didn't quite seem there with this one. it didn't seem like a film he truly wanted to make. but if that is the case, he actually did a fine job.