REVIEW | The Dark Knight Rises

This is not Spiderman 3. It is not Iron Man 2. But this is also not very good.

The final chapter of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is beautifully shot, with the cinematography and direction being superb throughout. The acting is excellent from those who have been with the trilogy throughout and even better from Hardy as Bane, JGL as the new Gary Oldman/spoiler and, best of all, Hathaway as Catwoman. These three, along with Bale, earn their moments of levity in this flick and they do so with aplomb. The major set pieces are just stunning, whether understated in the sense of the final scene involving the bomb or even the shots shown in the trailer of the bridges in the distance, or balls out crazy like that of the football stadium, they are created with the same level of detail and care.

Unfortunately everything else isn’t. There are far too many plot-holes in this movie to simply wave them off as being par for the course with a blockbuster (see another person’s excellent but spoilerific run through here for proof) but while I was sitting there in the cinema aghast at these utterly fucking bonkers moments, there are more fundamental problems. There is not a simple, central narrative to the story like those of the first films, making the entire middle section a mess. The editing is poor, even from the start where we are first introduced to Commissioner Gordon talking about Harvey Dent for a matter of seconds before cutting to Bane In A Plane for the entirety of that sequence before jumping back to Gordon talking about Dent making that initial moment entirely unnecessary. A daft nitpick but from that moment I knew that we were in for a bumpy ride. The now obligatory car chase is dumb as hell and serves absolutely no purpose. Bane is big but he is nowhere near as frightening as Joker.

This culminates in a film that, even if you were not acknowledging it as the final chapter of the series, has bigger stakes than the previous two and yet I felt nothing. No concern, no emotional tugs and no interest. It seems as though Nolan had a great many ideas for the film and, when the movie came in at over four hours, decided against cutting chunks to make it more linear and opted instead to trim, rendering the entire movie undeveloped. This not only makes it a disappointing end to the trilogy but a bad movie when considered as a stand-alone.

Verdict: Spunk

DAN