The Dark Night Tries to Rise....Trips on Himself and Falls

Rating: 3/10 (3 September 2012)

I am a huge fan of batman director Christopher Nolan. He is the genius who brought us such groundbreaking films as Memento and Inception, the very good Batman Begins and the excellent The Dark Night.
That's why my hopes for this third installment were so high. Boy was i disappointed.
This movie is a GRAND MESS. Here are some of the reasons why:
Nolan cuts off batman's balls and holds them hostage the entire movie. He is either hobbling around as Bruce Wayne looking like he belongs in a Senior's Home or in his batman's suit trading punches like an aged boxer with MS. No great fight scenes in the inimitable batman style with the whooshing and swooshing and swooping and gadgets and disappearances/reappearances.
I would conjecture that this is both because of the post modern philosophy adopted that no man is a true hero (including batman) and also more practically because the fight team was actually changed from the first two movies to a new one for this film, a change drastically for the worse. They should have stuck to the Keysi Fighting Method.
Another error is that any movie is only as good as its villain and Bane is a horrible villain. He's really more like a big goon that the main villain usually sends in the eleventh hour to do his bidding like the big Russian guy in the Punisher for example. Don't expect another performance like Ledger's Joker here.
What really gets me though, is how the second film developed the whole origin of Twoface as Harvey Dent (who was a great character) and then just dropped it and brought in a much worse villain????
Extremely irritating was Nolan superimposing the Inception style of for example heavy background music etc on this film where it doesn't belong. Even the dialogue was hard to always pick out, especially when you have two of the main characters growling through masks and the war drums right beneath their voices.
But it didn't stop there. Nolan invited almost the entire Inception cast and stuck them into this film inflating the story by giving them non- essential roles and by constantly taking you out of the illusion of reality a film is supposed to create when it forces another much better film to come to mind. He and his buds must have been having such a good time on set enjoying the Inception reunion that they must have forgot they were filming an entirely different movie.
The cherry on the top of this egregious casting is when in the middle of the film you suddenly have a cameo by none other than Cilian Murphy the scarecrow villain in the first Batman movie as some minor people elected judge. (And yes, you guessed it, he was also in Inception). To me that's tantamount to giving Heath Ledger (Joker) or Aaron Eckhart (Harvey Dent) a role as a cop or a waiter in this film. Seriously man, is there anything else you can do wrong to break the movie spell and keep reminding me i'm only watching a film with actors- something totally fake?
I wish i could stop here but honestly i could go on and on. The movie spends time with characters whose story lines are not that interesting and leads up to a cliché climax that you and i have seen done in previous TV shows like 24 and other films.
I believe the production suffered from the all too common problem of having too large a budget (250 million) that enabled Nolan to create a spectacle of "Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing" instead of an interesting film. The film alternates between dragging with boring exposition and blasting your ears off with nonsense. There is a tender moment between Bruce and Alfred that is very brief that was nice though ;)....
Guys, I went into the theatre ready to love this film, willing to try to like it, but it never even gave me the chance.
Unfortunately it does not live up to the hype. Like the Godfather Part 3, there is no reason to watch it even though you enjoyed the great Parts 1 and 2.
Let sleeping dogs lie and let dead films die. For your own sake, do not break the caution tape to watch this wretched bomb of a film.