Fails to Rise to the occasion

Rating: 4/10 (21 July 2012)

Nolan's recent blockbusters stand like looming corporate architecture: shining and cerebral; stately and sexless. His scripts are like visitors' guides to these spaces, proudly explaining every detail, surgically removing every doubt. His tell-don't-show insistence is of an artist possessing consummate technical skill and curiosity, but one unwilling to allow his crafted geometric edges to be rounded off with anything approaching satire or self-effacement. Nolan's style is rigorously formal and conservative, eliding evidence of the author in favour of ruthless aesthetic efficiency. Handsome and functional but lacking personality: Apple iPod films.
His sort-of-superhero trilogy began with Batman Begins, an elegant, taut, stirring comic book thriller, in which Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) struggled with his entrenched internal fears, and how to externalise them and use them as a weapon. It was followed by The Dark Knight, which had some fantastic scenes, usually involving the Joker, and maintained a convincing sense of dread up to a point. But it was dogged by hyper-plotting, scattergun characterisation and maddening verbosity - and sadly its successor continues and extends these trends.
The third film is set eight years after The Dark Knight, and we meet Wayne as a limping recluse, still suffering physically and emotionally from his sacrifice. The first hour is a spaghetti mass of new characters and reintroduced characters and references to characters, but it's pretty much the same plot as Avengers Assemble, with a bad guy (in this case Bane, played by Tom Hardy) threatening to use a powerful yet unstable energy source as a weapon of mass destruction. Bane was "born in hell on Earth". He's built like Lord Humungous from Mad Max 2, his gas mask looks like a Predator mouth, and he speaks like Darth Vader. Not nice. Luckily Batman has help from cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), feisty rookie cop Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and the usual wholesome oldies, Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Alfred (Michael Caine).
There's a great central scene in which Batman is lured to Bane's hideout, and the two go head-to-head, elbow-to-elbow. It's the one satisfying action scene in the film. (There's nothing to rival Begins' monorail showdown or The Dark Knight's truck chase.) Bane is still a seething, menacing presence at this point. All physicality: the embodiment of rage and fearlessness. But soon after he starts speaking at length, and his voice rises and his mystery evaporates, and he becomes just a man, much less than the horrible primeval idea he'd been before. If anyone could have done with a media spokesperson, it's Bane.
The film then enters zeitgeist territory, with Bane's army tearing down Wall Street (or whatever the Gotham equivalent might be), nullifying the police presence, and staging the ultimate Occupy protest, while the meek Gotham citizens cower indoors. By this point serious questions about plot logic and group dynamics emerge - a lot of "How did he end up there?" and "Why don't they just...?" type enquiries. This is what happens when writers follow every digression their story allows.
The Dark Knight Rises isn't a terrible film, but at nearly three hours the content must more compelling than this. I don't mind its neo- conservative messages; the worship of the feted elite is not new to the superhero canon. I can cope with the portentousness. Even Christian Bale's funny Batman voice doesn't bother me. These are all matters of taste. But if we're expected to take this stuff seriously then excessively exposition-heavy screen writing, narrative over-complexity in lieu of profundity, plot chasms, extraneous characterisation, and editorial indiscipline are inexcusable.
Remove the cumbersome political overtones and you're left with something disappointingly generic: a doubtful hero (with attachment issues, of course) facing up to a brutish nemesis, a city in peril, and an explosive showdown. So you might as well watch Avengers Assemble again.