As bad as The Dark Knight was good.

Rating: 1/10 (20 July 2012)

The Dark Knight Rises is a complete mess. It's convoluted, silly, inconsistent and worst of all DULL.
First I should give a frame of reference for giving it one star. If you compare this to Batman & Robin, then it's not a single star film. It's better than that at least. But I'd rate Batman Begins as an 8/10 and The Dark Knight as 9 or even 10/10. And compared on those grounds this is a total stinker and worthy of just 1/10.
The main problem here is just unchecked excess. Nolan has being given (and arguably earned) complete free reign to do what he likes with this franchise. So it's at his door that the blame must fall for this overblown mess.
Summer blockbusters falling victim to excess is nothing new. Michael Bay has built his career on it. But whereas his films are an overdose of action over story, here Nolan gets drunk on plot. There are so many plot strands running here and they all end up half-baked and largely redundant. And in his desperate struggle to weave them into something coherent, Nolan is forced to completely abandon character motivation and common sense and literally just shifts characters from one place to another with no cause-and-effect whatsoever.
There are so many plot holes here it's simply not worth listing them. A few plot holes can be forgiven in films that set the story in a fantastical universe, but Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were refreshingly serious portrayals of the superhero films and grounded them in a reality close to our own. The Dark Knight rises destroys that reality completely.
The characters are mostly bland too. Bane's voice simply doesn't work and he doesn't dominate physically as much as he should either. Catwoman is shuffled in and out whenever it's convenient and as a result we neither like nor dislike her. She's just there. Alfred is now a crying old softie. Gordon switches from terminally ill to Dwayne Johnson. And there's about a thousand other minor characters who are all cardboard cutouts.
And finally the dialogue is awful. Remember when Harvey Dent says to Bruce Wayne in TDK "you either die as a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" That was a nice line. But if EVERY character talks like that for the whole film it loses all meaning and suddenly you see the writer's hand everywhere. In TDKR people just start spouting pseudo-philosophical metaphors at each other about what the city needs. The city needs an airport, that's what it needs. And the franchise needs a long rest before the inevitable reboot.