Huh?

Rating: 6/10 (1 September 2012)

This film is certainly worth the price of a ticket, and I highly respect Nolan for wanting to shoot it on film. It generally looks very good. It's also loaded with "big scenes" for all sorts of secondary characters, and it was certainly a nice surprise to have Liam Neeson and Cillian Murphy return.
But what it comes down to is nearly three hours of pulse-pounding music, slugging, maiming, explosions, and the obligatory "funny" one-liners that come after brutal violence. It is indeed a brutal mess. Bane, super villain #3 in the trilogy, is like something out of those Mad Max movies, via television wrestling. The cultivated voice is a hoot, given his barbaric character. This all comes out of the old James Bond movies, and before that the criminal masterminds of countless pulp books and comics. But what does he offer that's new, except a seemingly supernatural ability to do whatever he wants and not be stopped? He can hire a company to dig holes and plant bombs under a city the size of New York, which has a super-powerful police force that has stopped all crime? Meanwhile, how does Bruce Wayne, having escaped from Hellhole prison (in some nameless Middle Eastern desert country?) get back to the USA? And how does he suddenly "manifest" himself in Gotham? Others have pointed out many flaws in police behavior. The sudden disruption of the market, coming at the same time as Wayne supposedly bankrupts his own company—-this doesn't capture the attention of the SEC and other organizations? The Board can meet that very next day and make radical changes, despite having gone bust? The city that is the center of American capitalism can be taken over by a revolutionary mob of criminals, and the American economy doesn't collapse? What happened to the stock market the day AFTER Bane took over?
What especially bothered me here was not so much the flawed plotting as the tedious pacing, the drawn-out series of climaxes, and the way the film suddenly just reverses course to give us a "happy ending." Batman "rises" just like Jake the Snake and then, despite a broken back, can accomplish all sorts of feats that a 25-year old marine would be hard-put to sustain.
The place where it all goes wrong, as I see it, is the football stadium sequence. That sudden catastrophe has real terror and captures the current American nightmare of being destroyed somehow both from beyond and from beneath our own soil, by enemies within the "body politic." Nothing can quite top this moment after that, and instead we are left to gape at physically impossible stunt flying, school buses with children being shot at by policemen (!), and a time period that is much too short for the carrying of a nuclear bomb to a "safe" detonation site. (No tsunami? No radiation worries? No dead fish piling up on shore?) And if Wayne was using autopilot, where was he?
I think every good or entertaining movie gets at least one or maybe two "gimmes" when it comes to flaws in narrative logic. If we're having a great time, we don't want to poke holes. But when again and again you start thinking, "Now how could THAT happen?" or "How did she get there" or "What happened to his seemingly fatal knife wound (and who fixed it)?" etc etc – well, then, enough is enough. (Here's one more: Selina gets a job as a maid at a party at Wayne Manor and then cracks his safe, getting a copy of his thumb print. How did she ever find the safe, if Wayne had become a recluse and the only staff around was Alfred? What did she know that we don't?)
Movies today have to be so "big" and "brutal" and filled with terror(ism) to make people sit up and take notice. We forget that a story like this was once much simpler and could be told in a clear graphic comic-book style that had far more excitement, because that medium is much thinner and doesn't want you to think everything is "really" happening. (You project your own imagination onto the story, rather than having the story impose itself on you.) But when you have to make billions of dollars on a franchise, and spend four years on a project this size, the sense of values is all skewed. Who can really take pleasure at a film's ending, after such momentous turmoil has been stirred up?
To make it worse, the whole thing has deep fascistic implications, that at least in the first two Spider-man movies were much less obvious. I'll take Tobey Maguire over Bale's gravel-voiced Batman any day, and feel that the world is a much better place with him around. He's sweet. And for a superhero, that's saying a lot!