Flawed but enjoyable

Rating: 8/10 (27 July 2012)

I am pleased to say that I finally arrived at the third and final movie in Christopher Nolan's and Christian Bale's Batman trilogy without having encountered significant spoilers. I have encountered a number of reviews, however, and I was expecting to be disappointed. I'm therefore also pleased to say I wasn't disappointed at all. The movie powered along nicely, kept me interested throughout, and did a number of things which I liked. To be fair, it also did a number of things which I didn't like quite so much, and I fear I am going to be doing some spoilering myself in respect of these points, although I will try to keep things as non-specific as possible.
This film was clearly constructed as the finale of a 3-act story: much which is in it is definitively final, and one of the things which both annoyed me and pleased me is the way the film contrived, at the end, to have its cake and eat it too. For me, it achieved this successfully, and this was probably the single element I enjoyed most. But I also liked the action (except the two Batman / Bane fights, in which these highly trained masters of multiple combat styles punched and punched and punched...), the music (those fabulous booming, blaring horns), the reveals in the closing section, and the way Bane's story tied into Ra's al Ghul's. And I liked the comic acknowledgements, something which Nolan has studiously avoided until now (apart from using comic characters, of course): here we had both No Man's Land and, more significantly, The Breaking Of The Bat, both presented on screen.
I enjoyed all the performances. Anne Hathaway was a nicely conceived and performed Selina Kyle, perfectly capturing the conflict between a life of crime and an essentially good heart (plus the tight leather catsuit was, in my view A Good Thing. It was nice to see Juno Temple, too, albeit in a meagre role). I liked Bane - a well realised variant on the comic. I loved his vocal performance - those psychotic, murderous utterances delivered in that hearty, convivial manner was not at all what I expected. And, as in the previous movies, Michael Caine's Alfred was the beating heart of the film, and the one part which injected a massive dose of emotion, thus going a long way towards countering one of the main criticisms of Christopher Nolan, namely that his films tend to be intellectual but heartless.
Which is why that aspect was high on the list of things which disappointed me: when Alfred walks out halfway through the movie so, too, goes much of the emotion, and what follows is exciting but not especially involving, especially when a muddy sound mix meant that dialogue was often lost. There were a number of elements in a needlessly complicated plot which didn't bear close examination, most of which didn't worry me too much (after all, he is The Batman!), but two items niggled. One was the idea that it would be possible to calculate the rate of decay in a nuclear device to the second: there were so many other ways to have incorporated the suspense of a countdown into the plot which would have been more elegant and credible (and, to that extent, better written: this was clumsy screen writing). And the other was the determination of Batman's nemesis to obliterate Gotham City in a nuclear blast: given that this could have been done at any point during the latter half of the movie, why didn't they simply do it?
Incidentally, for something so quintessentially American, how little of the primary talent in these films has been American: out of director, screenwriters and actors, only Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart, Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway have been American (Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hardy - English; Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy - Irish; Heath Ledger - Australian; Rutger Hauer - Dutch; Marion Cotillard - French). I'm not sure what this says, though.