The Dark Knight Rises

Saw this with the wife over the weekend and I have, well, highly mixed feelings.

First off, I kinda dreaded going into it, because every Christopher Nolan film is, to me, an ordeal. His movies are long, involved, long, filled with lots of set action pieces, long, somewhat morally ambiguous, stuffed with overwhelming special effects, and long. The Dark Knight Rises clocks in at 2 hours and 50 minutes (according to Fandango). I’m somewhat famously and annoyingly known as a true believer in the adage that the perfect movie is one that falls somewhere between 89 and 91 minutes in length. Or perhaps I made that up. Anyway, I wasn’t looking forward to seeing two back-to-back movies, especially since I was up early that morning for work and we were attending the 9 pm showing.

But … I was interested in how Nolan completed his Batman trilogy. Word of mouth was good, at least the words coming out of the mouths I was listening to. Not being a comic book guy and not being a comic book kid growing up, I was unfamiliar with this Bane dude as the baddie. Catwoman looked kinda boring from what I’d seen in previews, so I wondered whether that character played by the actress with Giant Eyeballs would be a disappointment or not.

And, of course, Batman with his hi-tech toys of destruction. Though I must admit, with the mellowing of age, those don’t really excite me much as they may have when Tim Burton was helming the franchise.

Let’s just cut to the chase. My verdict? B-plus.

Pros: Batman doing a Rocky redemption (you know, Balboa gets his butt kicked then has to re-commit to re-train to re-deem himself), Giant Eyeballs as Catwoman (much to my chagrin), the Bat jet copter thingie, the young cop who becomes You-Know-Who, Bane, Scarecrow’s “Death or Exile” judgments, Exile.

Cons: Not enough Batman, too much Bruce Wayne, too much Bruce Wayne losing all his money, a teary and blubbering Alfred going to pieces every chance he got, Catwoman’s dialogue, Bane, the whole doomsday plot scenario, the “big reveals” during the last 15 minutes.

There were plot holes and there were plot holes. The first thing I noticed was how Bruce Wayne could turn from a hobbling cripple to a jujitsu acrobatic master because there’s a little robot joint strapped onto his knee. And how does our penniless hero return from the Russian(?) prison, and how is he able to get back into Gotham City (cut off by martial law and accessible only via a treacherous semi-icy river)? Later there was Batman wasting precious minutes (hours?) detailing his logo in flammable liquid on a bridge so another character could drop his lighter on it, lighting it up for no discernible reason. The time line of the flick I found somewhat confusing, with Bruce growing a beard in the Russian(?) prison while the cops imprisoned beneath Gotham don’t. Plus, the bomb was supposed to go off in five months and suddenly we’re doing an eighteen, then a twelve, hour countdown.

Perhaps all the teenagers chatting to each other on their cell phones distracted me from informative expository plot points.

All things considered, though, those 170 minutes went by fast. I was entertained. My mind didn’t get stuck on plot holes or otherwise get taken out of the story. It was a decent story with a decent ending. Could it have been better? Yes, I suppose. Can’t really say without spoiling the story, but I’d’ve left the ending more ambiguous. Would’ve given the two main bad guys better death scenes. Would’ve made the one major cameo a little longer and a little more significant. Would’ve scrapped the whole destroy Gotham theme for one more in line with megalomaniacal global conquest more suitable to a comic book villain.

But then it wouldn’t be a Christopher Nolan Batman movie.

A word about Bane … mixed feelings about him, too. Superficially, he had the makings of a decent bad guy. Intelligent, menacing, physically powerful, unscrupulous in carrying out his Big Plan. An awesome speaking voice, too, I might add, thank you Dolby Stereo. He had an Achilles heel, which Batman rightly finds (but why did it take until the end of the movie?). However, for a PG-13 movie, he was an awfully nasty bad guy. My wife was shocked at the evil-ness of his actions. Me, I was shocked by the sheer brutality. I mean, how many necks can you break with your bare hands? How much psychological torture can you dish out? How much random acts of violence can you inflict on to innocent civilians? How can you slay your own henchmen willy-nilly and still expect them to perform for you? Yes, we don’t see much blood ’n guts, but we see something much worse – blatant disregard for human life on all levels. I felt dirty about halfway through the movie. It went from excited expectation to see the villain onscreen to sour disgust whenever he made an appearance, and the transition happened probably sometime around the one-hour mark. And the greatest sin was that, ultimately, his motivations for his evil just didn’t make sense.

So a definite mixed bag. Probably the worst film of the trilogy, but that’s like saying The Two Towers is the worst book in The Lord of the Rings – it’s still miles ahead of its closest knock-off. And despite all the aforementioned negatives, I’ll undoubtedly watch it again when it comes out on DVD, with a more critical, discerning eye in a teenager-free setting.