Predictable, disappointing - not close to The Dark Knight

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2012)

The first half will be my overall opinion with care to avoid major spoilers.
With The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR), we pick up eight years later. Bruce Wayne has become a recluse, his business empire is going down the drain, and Gotham City is oh-so-proud of its law, inspired by the heroic Harvey Dent, that keeps criminals locked away without parole. Yes, the good times are a-rollin' in Gotham City. For the rich, anyway. Bruce is pulled from his crippled state of melancholy by Selina Kyle ripping off his mother's pearls – and his fingerprints in the process. Curious as to how his magic safe got cracked, never mind why anyone wants his prints, he boots up the Bat Cave.
Simultaneously, an aged Commissioner Gordon ends in the tunnels beneath the city during a routine chase and notes there's a whole gang of nefarious types down there, led by, as one brilliant person on Twitter called him, "a Scottish Foghorn Leghorn with a doll house radiator stuck in his mouth". From here, worlds collide...
Visually, this is as dark and brooding as any viewer would want this to be. The gadgets are cool, the costumes fun (aside from Catwoman – the ear-goggles combo was childish), and everyone looks the part. Bale's Wayne has visible scars and internal damage that's true to what the average man would endure while playing superhero. He looks older, somewhat less muscular, and has to work to get back into shape.
The difference between a man and a symbol is prominent in this film, as well as the notion of yin and yang. Specifically, you need to fear death to truly fight to survive. If we don't care about the consequences of failure, we cannot rise.
TDKR has several huge issues with it that result in a film that falls flat. For starters, Anne Hathaway as Catwoman ugh. We all know she got this job because she is a Hollywood "it girl" right now. While she's not as terrible as Halle Berry, she's incredibly unconvincing. For starters, she doesn't look sexy or seductive, with or without the suit. Every time she prances on screen, she reminds me of a teenage girl playing at Lolita. Her strange accent she's adopted for this role isn't sultry or sinister; it just sounds fake. Frankly, all she's got going for her is flexibility and spiky heels.
Bane I couldn't understand half of his dialogue, and given that Nolan is huge on dialogue as a part of his message, this is a tremendous issue.
The plot comes off tired, takes too long to get going, skims through what should be the bulk of the film, and twists at the end in such a way that you will roll your eyes at how Nolan destroys everything he's set out to do for the first two hours (or, in the case of Batman, the entire trilogy).
Whew! Here's where I suggest you leave if you have yet to see the film. Seen it? Let's really chat.
I hated the ending. I actually loved the initial ending, but the ultimate ending wimps out. If the point of this entire film was to comment on the mortality of men versus the eternal life of a symbol,then Wayne should have died. After all, what you're telling me is that a) even though he told Selina that he couldn't use autopilot, she managed to meet up with him; b) if Alfred hallucinated that finale, he thought Selina was a good girlfriend; c) he managed to leave a bag of goodies for Blake; and d) Lucius never noticed that Wayne fixed the autopilot.
Sorry, but no. You pulled a serious Deus ex machina out of your a**.
Speaking again of Kyle: I don't buy her as a poor, hapless girl unable to catch a break. I don't buy Bruce forgiving her for setting him up to get his back broken by Bane. I don't buy him trusting her in the grand finale to suddenly be a good girl, let alone her love for him.
Next plot issue: the class war theme is tired. We already had that in a more subtle and intriguing fashion during The Dark Knight, when the Joker pits the two ferries against each other. Strangely, he somehow spins from his initial message, delivered by Selina, of "How dare the rich think they can be so powerful and leave nothing for us?" to "The poor murder and riot without impunity and this is why the cops have a right to slaughter the uprising and be in power forever."
The whole "Bruce fails to escape" shtick got old fast. In fact, it's used to accelerate time like a diluted montage, just so Nolan can skip over most of the five months. I don't get it: you spend forever getting us to this point and we get maybe ten solid minutes of the anarchy and reversal of fortunes, featuring a horrifically underused Cillian Murphy.
Blake recognizing Wayne was vastly oversimplified. Instead of also pointing out his hiatus and connection to past events, all he can say is "You're a rage-y orphan like me with a mask, so you're Batman"? No. Levitt is fantastic in this film, and I did enjoy the end acknowledgement of what I knew from moment one, but his deduction skills were unbelievable.
Last: the castration of Bane's character. He's just a crying man in love with Miranda/Talia? Ugh. I liked him better as the unstoppable beast Batman just couldn't overpower. Kinda didn't care for the Miranda twist.
Summing up: casting, aside from Hathaway, was stellar; the core message of death/mortality/symbols and class war was a good idea executed imperfectly; but ultimately, the film becomes an indulgent piece that doesn't know when to quit.