Decent Plot, Lackluster Direction

Rating: 5/10 (7 December 2012)

I never saw TDKR at the theatres because I'd heard it was all about terrorism and Occupy Wall Street nonsense, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that the movie has much more of a French Revolution plot to it. In fact,I really liked Bane's plan: turn the city over to "the people" after stoking up the class-warfare thing, and then sitting back and laughing as The People destroy society through mindless chaos and violence.
I wish more of the movie had been about the trials they started conducting (with the Scarecrow as Judge). You know, it would have been the corrupt rich on trial first, then "regular" rich people, then upper middle class workers, then the middle class. The crowds would have gotten bigger and more bloodthirsty until finally people started to realize that they'd run out of "villains" and were just killing their neighbors at random. Would there be food riots in the streets? Would private militias form? How would petty crimes be handled by the residents? What a great concept for a Batman movie! Unfortunately, we spent too much time with Bruce Wayne and his personal problems and all this other extraneous stuff with a degrading nuclear bomb, and villains in love, and old friends breaking up/reuniting, etc.
Plus, the movie seemed to be plodding along much of the time. Direction was poor and on the level of a TV show. Place the camera, have a bunch of extras play-fight, and call "Cut". Very little suspense was ever built up, as characters showed up in a scene, hit their marks, and moved on. Fights between Bane and Batman were poor.
Why hire a good actor to play Bane if you're going to cover up his face the whole time? Was that his real voice? What was he saying the entire movie? I never could tell. As far as I knew, Bane was just a big bald guy with a weird mask.
I think any episode of "24" was probably more suspenseful, had better dialog, and was better directed than TDKR.
Also, how would the NFL classify that football game? Did the touchdown count?