Another mega Batman movie with Batman missing

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2016)

The Dark Knight Rises follows along the lines of The Dark Knight. A superhero movie where the superhero is absent most of the time. Initially Wayne is crippled and recluse and Batman retired altogether. A bit of romantic teasing with a thief/Catgirl makes Wayne come back into the open. When a gang of thieves led by Bane attack the stock exchange, Batman returns to action. The attack bankrupts Wayne enterprises. Alfred resigns, leaving Wayne and Batman pretty much on their own. On top of that the person who Wayne picked to run Wayne Enterprises also turns on him. Then Catgirl deceives Batman and leads him to Bane's trap. As a result Wayne ends up in a prison/mine for another good chunk of the movie. In other words, this is again a Batman movie without much of Batman.
Eventually he manages to escape--to rise out of the ground. By then Bane's plan to destroy Gotham is in full gear. And he intends to do so with a Wayne enterprises reactor-turned nuclear bomb no less. By now Batman has hooked up with a young detective who knows about Wayne's past. The lame commissioner is also back. And they all aim to stop Bane's masterplan. This time around at least Batman gets to fly around in some plane-thing.
This too is then a convoluted long movie with a lot going on. What interested me the most was the Catgirl angle and Ra's al Ghul's legacy and family tree. The mythology isn't emphasized enough in these movies. Why Nolan's Batman movies are so devoid of Batman I don't get but here we have strong and interesting alternate characters in Catgirl and detective Blake. The problem with our main villain Bane is that he wears a mouthmask making him hard to understand, which makes his villain-speeches far less powerful. Of course he's not the only villain as there is no shortage of bad guys/gals. And a single and mostly absent good guy can't make up for it.