A Tedious, Poorly Paced and Poorly Written Movie. HUGE Disappointment Here.

Rating: Null/10 (17 July 2012)

Interesting story and a valiant attempt to close the trilogy big but TDKR ultimately has to be considered a huge failure. It won't fail at the box office but it fails on screen. I'm shocked that a Chris Nolan film delivers poor character development. Bad or underwhelming action? Sure, we kind of expect that from Nolan at this point but to get a poorly told and BLOATED story is shocking. Who is responsible for delivering a tedious and poorly written movie? Did Nolan write this himself and was he that uninspired when he did so??? It seems to me like he felt he had to follow TDK because of the buzz and was self conscious and clumsy about doing so. That really does show up on the screen. It's like he had an idea but had to be so large as to top TDK that he lost his way. The meandering yet overcrowded story didn't deliver what it was supposed to at all. Did we really learn about any character or come to care for anyone at all beyond what we already did? This movie tries to cash in on its predecessor's coat tails but really can't stand on its own. I love this cast and actually felt bad for them DURING its running time. It's bad when a movie takes you completely out of the film and makes you pity the cast. It also lacked pacing, it wandered, it repeated, and it just failed to build any real momentum. Average action sequences seem so out of place this late in the summer. Bigger and better films had already raised the bar and TDK just couldn't give audiences anything as good in terms of action despite throwing millions of dollars at the screen and fancy new jets and vehicles at us. All that bad action may look good on the TV spots and may eat up screen time but it doesn't add anything to the movie and felt as shallow as a dull video game.
Following TDK with this simply lowers everything we've seen before. This is almost exactly like following Godfather 2 with Godfather 3's mess of a movie. It's such a shame.