Only gets worse after a re-watch

Rating: 4/10 (26 November 2012)

After taking the fall for Harvey Dent's tragic demise multi-millionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale returns) turns into a semi-crippled recluse hiding out in his mansion, reducing his companionship to the faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine). Gotham is now a city governed by the rigid Dent Act, which has cleared the streets of crime, but overfilled the prisons. With Batman now both obsolete and wanted the war on crime is seemingly won and even the hero Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) contemplates a hard earned rest, while still troubled by the Batman's sacrifice. That is until the up-and-commance of the masked mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy voiced by Sean Connery) topples the facade and awakes Wayne's past demons. Batman reemerges - together with Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) karate high-heeling and street-cop Blake (Joseph Gordon-Lewitt) as the moral fibre of the city.
The masterful "The Dark Knight" together with a relatively spectacular career spanning from "Memento", "Batman Begins" and "Inception" the Nolanite army has become a powerful force (as proved by the ridiculously high IMDb ranking of this movie). Despite apparent flaws, idiosyncrasies and an inexplicable flush of "Batman and Robin" reminiscent cheesy one-liners, the ending to the trilogy has garnered an astounding 8,8 rating. Much is owed to the brilliance of the previous two outings of Nolan's Batman, especially to the mind-warping villainous and already legendary Heath Ledger Joker (not toppled by the slightly bombastic and naive ending of the boat conundrum). With the whole film world in awe everyone wanted and expected the Batman trilogy to end as a masterpiece.
Alas - it was not to be. Naturally the final part lacked the same captivating evil-doer as Joker and no one expected anything of the same magnitude to be possible. Although Hardy as Bane does a great job making himself a credible and deadly opponent to Batman, he lacks the same story impact (unable to carry the movie as Ledger did in his outing), which is even more diminished as he is inexcusably downgraded and lazily disposed of before the denouement. Therefore it was quite apparent that the weight of the final part of Nolan's Batman will lay strongly on the shoulders of the plot and story, which would have to outdo the already sturdy scripts in the first two outings. Unfortunately for the Nolan brothers their creative genius is vastly overrated, as they embark onto their final Batman adventure with a nonsensical script ridden with holes as vast as an exploding stadium and several iffy performances (featuring the most laughable death scene in living memory). These flaws are glossed over by the technical and narrative brilliance of Christopher Nolan, who manages to bring together a pretty looking picture with framing to die for. However instead of coherence Nolan goes for the effect factor, regardless of logical bearing (like the visually engulfing, but literally dumbfounded police squad fist fight).
After giving the movie a second chance, the incessant problems instead of receding, start overflowing and expanding (instead of one sore thumb down your other thumb starts feeling numb). Essentially "The Dark Knight Rises" does best as a pure action flick, even though sequences are rather sparse and interlope with many dramatic sequences of varying valour. Nolan's picture is mostly dissatisfying on a cerebral level - various moral questions appear, but function mostly as superficial and purely instrumental plot points. Given Nolan's capabilities a more focused look into the morality of the Dent Act or the underpinnings of the nod to the Occupy Wall Street movement would have been very welcome. Instead Nolan offers us outtakes of cheesy superhero one-liners like "This isn't a car" and ventures in soapy melodrama with a side order of overcooked pathos. Not quite Michael Bay's "Transformers" or "Batman and Robin", but much closer in class to those productions than to the previous Nolan Batman movies or Tim Burtons comiccy gems.