The Boring Knight Rises

Rating: 1/10 (21 July 2012)

Spoilers ahead.
They could have cut out an hour and it would have been just as good as it is at 3 hours.
Robin or Nightwing or John Blake, gets promoted to detective. He walks up to some suspicious criminals, one tries to attack from behind, he floors him with some quick action but another jumps on his back. He ricochets a bullet off a truck into this guy and kills him. Oops. Broke the Batman code already. Then instead of jumping on the guy he floored, he jumps on the guy he just freaking killed and tries to question him! Real smart Batman replacement.
Catwoman has no purpose in this movie at all other than to advance the plot. They didn't even have the decency to turn her into an object of teenage fantasies.She's on the fence, good and bad, but mostly bad cause 1. She steals Bruce Wayne's family heirlooms, then his fingerprints, then his car, traps him in a cage with Bane like some prison rape scene. Later Batman is like, I'm sure there's still some good in you. They even wind up kissing! Typical bad relationships. There's never any explanation for Catwoman's behavior on either side.
Bane sounds like some old scrawny guy got trapped in a Darth Vader suit and is having a panic attack. Most of what he says makes no sense to me. It's like he's a record played backwards on helium sometimes spun too fast or too slow, I don't know. He isn't believable as Bane that's all I can say really. You could cut out everything Bane says and still understand what's going on in the movie. Just insert your own words, that's what I did in my mind since I couldn't understand what he was saying.
Everybody gets way too much screen time except those in costume. Batman and Catwoman are barely on screen, and barely do anything important. It doesn't feel like a comic book movie, although the story is built like one.
The battles between Batman and Bane are a joke. The first one is not nearly as dramatic as it should have been. The comic is more theatrical than the theatrical event. Batman doesn't do Batman stuff, he throws some cheap bottle rockets at Bane, not even a 5 year old would be impressed with. Why not something more blinding? Like a freaking flash-bang, or why not just shoot the guy? He's got nothing on for protection at all. An entire utility belt to use, and he uses the weakest stuff he can yank out. He doesn't zip line around, he's not even aerial, it's just a straight up boxing match. What kind of Batman fight scene is this supposed to be??? The weakest of all!
Gordon defies all odds by lobbying and directing a broken down police force to get this bomb delayed, just getting out of the hospital after months, he winds up jumping on a semi type vehicle and gets tossed around, just to have Batman fly the bomb out of the city just in the nick of time. I would have been a little upset if I was Gordon, why didn't he just do that anyways?? Besides, what if they DID make it with the bomb and disarmed it? Then Batman wouldn't have been able to make his exit... so really Batman made all of this happen just so he could stage his death. That's pretty bad...
Tom Hardy is terrible at being Bane, you can never tell if his voice is attached to the body. There's no movement or reactions, just some lifeless glare with no personality. Since his back-story is part of the plot twist at the end, we just don't care about anybody.
We could care less about Catwoman cause we don't know why she does anything, We could care less about Miranda cause she just shows up, we don't know why Bruce Wayne doesn't want to be Batman from the start, he doesn't even want to be Bruce Wayne.
Batman barely does anything, Catwoman shoots Bane dead for him, and Talia dies in a car wreck. Aside from a short sequence at the beginning and two very bad fights with Bane, all he does is get stabbed and stages his own death.
The movie is a jumbled mess. There's really no reason to watch it, it's better to let it end at The Dark Knight. This movie is awful. Aside from being excellent visually... there's nothing memorable about this movie.