very disappointed

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2012)

I can say that about one hour into this movie, I was wondering when a superhero movie was going to start or if I had accidentally walked into the wrong theater. I was very disappointed by the lack of action sequences that probably only totaled around 15 minutes out of an almost three hour movie. The Dark Knight was one of my all time favorite movies because it balanced action with great dialog and acting where you never felt "when is something going to happen?" The Dark Knight Rises had me feeling that way most of the time. This is supposed to be a superhero movie, not a drama, but that is what this movie is for 80% of the running time. I felt that the action sequences were also anti-climatic and quite boring. If I want to see a movie with loads of great dialog, I'll stick with Tarentino. Lots of dialog isn't always bad, but in this case it became very repetitive and did little to move the story forward. It appeared to me that this movie had the opposite problem that Prometheus had. Way to long for what should've been a 2 hour movie. It just seemed like Nolan wanted to make an epic ending to his trilogy and thought all epic movies MUST be 3 hours long, no matter how much filler there is.
The other disappointment for me was the generic "bomb in the city" plot that has been used ad nauseum in action movies for decades. The Dark Knight came up with a very clever plot of turning citizens on each other as the terrorist plot. I was expecting much better from Nolan than this old cliché'. And speaking of cliché's, the hero no longer being able, or wanting to do the job has also been done too many times now as well.
I know many people loved this movie and I'll probably get blasted for this review, but I can honestly say I can't see how anyone thought this installment even compared to The Dark Knight. I took my 14 year old nephew to see it and he felt the exact same way I did. All I'm saying is that if I want to watch a good drama, then I'll go to watch one, but don't try to give me a weak drama wrapped in a superhero movie. When I go see a movie about a comic book hero, there are certain expectations that I have, one of them being there to be at least a good mix of action with dialog. If I knew what this movie was like before hand, I would've waited for it to come out on blu-ray and had skipped this yapfest.