The Knight shall rise!

Rating: 10/10 (20 July 2012)

Long gone are the days when I would watch Channel 4 in the mornings as a child to see a strange superhero dressed in a leotard fight comical characters with the words BOOM or POW hiding all the punches. Gone are the days when I would see Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed as a camp ice man. No, director Christopher Nolan has taken our superhero Batman and created a serious and adult world where nothing is a joke. His last effort, The Dark Knight, is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time, and so with the much awaited arrival of this sequel, the question being asked is.....can he top it?
The Dark Knight Rises is set eight years after the last film, Gotham City has been cleaned of all it's crime and Batman is in exile, nothing could go wrong surely? Well the opening of the film ends that theory with an excellent teaser of our main villain in the film, Bane, a beast of a man with a voice that sounds hilariously like a mixture of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, and Darth Vader (I kid you not). Bane is hell- bent on starting a ''people's revolution'' in Gotham and has acquired an army of followers. Bruce Wayne is now a recluse with nothing to live for, but will this Bane character tempt him to don the suit again? Added to the mix we have a sub-plot of Selina Kyle, a criminal with ''feline'' powers who inadvertently finds herself involved in the action and Blake, a young rookie cop who knows more than he lets on......
Whilst the film doesn't top it's classic predecessor, it certainly matches it. Whereas the last film was about chaos and anarchy, this film is more about pain and suffering, it has more emotion, characters from previous films, such as Bruce Wayne, Alfred the Butler, and Gordon the police commissioner, are given more depth and the film is all the better for it. Bane plays an excellent villain that manages to intrigue and captivate, I liked that his origin story also ties the trilogy together, it makes Gotham feel more like it's own universe. The acting performances are a masterclass, particularly from Inception alumni Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy.
The action scenes are spectacles to behold, they always manage to surprise, my favourite scene was an epic showdown between Police Officers and an army of youths lined up like it was 300, some true urban warfare. Overall, the whole film works as a perfect finale to the possibly the greatest trilogy of all time. Amazing.
10/10