An Abject Failure...

Rating: 1/10 (26 August 2012)

A horrible, bloated, clumsy and often surprisingly amateurish mess that constantly reaches for profoundly unearned emotions and falsely pumped-up thrills.
Ann Hathaway's Catwoman is, by miles, the best thing in this overcrowded, misguided concoction (of course she's never called Catwoman, because ultimately Nolan is embarrassed to be doing a super hero movie, as virtually every creative decision he makes here proves). But like anything else that might even be a little bit interesting in this movie, her character and storyline are steamrolled with the rest of the ingredients into a flat, boring cacophony.
The music is relentlessly pounding, probably in the hopes that you wont notice how rickety and poorly crafted the story is.
Christian Bale virtually phones in his performance. He plays Batman as a mouth-breather (he actually never closes his mouth when in the cowl, making Batman look like some poor kid at summer camp with severe allergies) and he's incapable of bringing the slightest touch of character to Bruce Wayne. Where is Batman the master martial artist? The World's Greatest Detective? The unstoppable force of nature? Not here. Not in this movie.
And the amazing Tom Hardy? Completely wasted and mostly unintelligible.
The script is a train wreck. There are more plot holes and leaps of logic in this film than in the Avengers, and that movie had a Norse God fighting alongside a monster of science against giant interdimensional worms. The Avengers, by the way, was twice as fun, which was expected, but shockingly, only half as stupid as this movie.
Here, let me give you a rundown of terrible, terrible logic loops, sustained stupidity, and just flat out disregard the for audience's intelligence. SPOILERS!
1. A massive terrorist raid on the stock exchange to make a single trade that leaves Bruce Wayne Broke. Okay... what the f.u.c.k.? A. Hacking a computer system does not require proximal space violence. It's called hacking. B. You're telling me they didn't shut down the stock exchange in a crises situation? C. No one questioned a massive trade that rendered one of the wealthiest men in the world broke, when that trade was performed in the middle of a destructive high-speed chase that would have been news across the entire country, let alone the entire world?
2. Batman and Bruce Wayne are the least interesting characters to the filmmakers. Batman's time on screen is incidental and his actions boring. It is a Batman film with no interest in Batman at all.
3. The Harvey Dent tough-on-crime bill has ended crime? Have you ever seen, in your lifetime, a city go from total social meltdown to utopia where the cops have nothing to do, because of a single bill that was passed? Later, when Gordon knows Dent didn't die a hero, he doesn't tell anyone, because somehow this will make the law less effective? For all his desire to make a "real world" superhero film, Nolan obviously has no idea about how the real world works. Toon Town in the Roger Rabbit movie had a more realistic governing set of laws.
4. Bruce Wayne is in prison forever and we hear the same damn story told over and over and over again, and it's all gender neutral so they can have one last tedious reveal at the end.
5. "Your spinal vertebrae is sticking out of your back, here let me just punch it in! GHA! There much better. Only a matter of time before you're batman again."
6. I once saw an episode of Vice Travel where some journalist bought a dirty bomb in Chechnya for a handful of cash. Yeah. But Bane doesn't like doing things the easy way. God forbid he just buy a bomb from a corrupt ex-soviet general. No, instead he elaborately fakes the death of a scientist (apparently the only nuclear physicist in the world, by the way), waits for Wayne to build a fusion generator beneath Gotham so he can then steal its core and use it as an atomic bomb to hold ALL OF GOTHAM hostage. Then kills the scientist.
7. It takes five months for the US to send special ops into Gotham? Really? Let's say Gotham is New York, which it is in this ponderous piece of crap. Let's say a terrorist was holding New York Hostage... for five months. You're telling me that the citizens of New York, that the military of the United States, that the nuclear scientists of the world... are going to let that happen? That the people won't rise up immediately, that the military won't have drones flying around constantly looking for radiation signatures and have infiltrated the whole damn island with special ops, that the scientists won't figure out a way to drop EMP pulse grenades across the island to shut down the mechanical device that triggers the fission explosion? Five months of just sitting on their hands?
8. An atomic explosion off the coast of Gotham, and everything's cool! No worries! Radiation fallout? Na. Poisoned ocean? Forget about it. No big deal.
9. And the worst crime of all, the co-opting of the OCCUPY RHETORIC to disenfranchise the movement. Occupy Wall St. slogans are readily and repeatedly spoken by a monstrous, mad, deceiving, mass murdering terrorist. Do we ever see the plight of the average joe in DK Rises? Never. Which is shocking since there are about 300 characters, each with more screen time than Batman. What we get is a real life political movement used in the fictional service of Kangaroo Courts, martial law, and dictatorship. I don't care if Nolan meant for Bane to be using the language of Occupy for his own corrupt and selfish ends, it's irresponsible filmmaking.
And that's just some of the eye-rolling stupidity packed into this thing.
All and all, DK Rises is tedious, boring crap.