A disappointing follow up to an amazing film.

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2012)

-May contain spoilers.- I don't even know where to begin with my criticism of this film. What I can start off by saying is that after the sheer amazing storytelling performed in The Dark Knight, this movie failed utterly to follow it up. I think the main reason was because in The Dark Knight it was not Christian Bale as The Batman you found yourself relating to, or even rooting for, but Heath Ledger as The Joker.
Once more we find a film where the bad guy seems more human than the supposed hero. I found that I could relate more to Bane than I could Batman. Though not as good as The Joker, Tom Hardy does a decent job of playing his role as Bane, the once-imprisoned mercenary whose only sin was losing his humanity for the love of a child. His frank honesty and seemingly heartfelt desire to liberate the common man really struck a chord with me and I spent the entire film hoping he would pull it off.
Once again Christian Bale delivers a wooden, unbelievable role as The Batman. Poor acting and the pure goofiness of how he changes his voice once he dons the costume lose it for me. Unlike the first one where a large portion of the movie is spent with The Joker, Bane's appearances are far and in-between so you get to spend more time with Bale as Batman on screen and this killed it for me. One scene in particular towards the end where he is beating on Bane, asking about the detonator had me cracking up at how campy Bale's "angry voice" is and how stupid his mouth looked as even it moved over-dramatically with his spoken words.
Sadly, even Michael Caine's performance as Alfred was cheesy and his supposedly emotional scenes were unbelievable and just plain dumb. Though I have to say that Anne Hathaway provided some form of relief with her performance as Catwoman, though she looked the part more so than any previous attempt at Selina Kyle, she could not put a "scratch" on the surface of Pfeiffer's 1992 performance as the same.
As I like to make my reviews unbiased, I can honestly say that even from the standpoint of someone who enjoyed the comics, this movie took one too many liberties. Where the original Robin was the child of circus performers, this movie tries to introduce him as an orphaned police officer.
I only give this movie four stars because of Hardy's redeeming performance as Bane. Otherwise, this film did not come close to touching even the worst of films in the Batman series.