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So as you know, I stopped writing lengthy reviews on this site this year, keeping the blog as more of a film diary of sorts.  Lo and behold,...

Monday, February 11, 2013

Movie Review - The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Starring Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Matthew Modine, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine
Directed by Christopher Nolan

I've been avoiding reviewing The Dark Knight Rises for nearly a month now and the only reason I can think of is that after concluding this film there was just a sense of apathy that has only increased as time as passed.  It's not that this final chapter in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is bad -- it's slightly better than the Batman Begins origin story, but not nearly as good as The Dark Knight -- but it's really just feels most genericly superhero-ey of the three flicks.

We've got our good guy Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale whose teeth-gritting toughness as his alter ego has worn out its welcome by this point) who has put Batman to rest after the masked vigilante took the blame for killing Harvey Dent in the prior film.  However, evil rears its ugly head again, this time in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy) who vows to fight the capitalistic rich pigs of Gotham by taking all of them down and suppressing the poor himself.  Throw in a petty thief named Selena Kyle (Anne Hathaway) who will later turn into the slinky Catwoman (although I'm not sure that name is ever uttered in the movie), a new love interest for Bruce in the form of Wayne Enterprises board member Miranda (Marion Cotillard), and a young cop named Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who tries to be the voice of reason to motivate Batman to come back to Gotham after Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) almost resigns himself to the fact that the masked man won't return and the cast for this one is pretty much complete.

The problem is that despite the film's nearly three-hour runtime, the cast isn't given a whole lot to do. Bane as a villain is a disappointment especially coming after the one-two punch of Heath Ledger's Joker and Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent in the last film.  The motivation of taking down the upper class is fine (despite it sort of feeling like a retread of Ra's Al Ghul's evil plans in the first film), but the screenwriting duo of the Nolan brothers fail to make the story resonate even in these heightened economic times.

Gordon-Levitt and Hathaway were certainly welcome additions and it was nice that ample time was spent on their storylines since (as I mentioned above) Bale's incredibly one-note performance while in his Batsuit had worn out its welcome.  Unfortunately, Tom Hardy fails to really make an impression as Bane.  After the whimsically evil performance of Ledger's Joker, having Hardy behind a mask for the whole film and failing to see a single facial expression from our central villain is a bit of a letdown that isn't his fault in the slightest.

In the end, Nolan's Batman trilogy is solid, but it's not nearly as fantastic as fanboys and critics would have you believe.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-

4 comments:

  1. I pretty much agree with all of this. Except I would say this movie's dialog needed to be louder. I could hardly hear the dialog half of the time.

    D:

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  2. That was a complaint of some who saw it in a theater. I was about to say "I'm sure that's where you saw it," but then I realized that probably wasn't the case at all. Oops.

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  3. Yeah, I saw it in September because that's how long it took for a bootleg to show up on to the ship.

    And when we got a legit copy (like october) it was still the same issue.

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  4. It’s a very long flick, but I could have honestly gone on longer. There was so many moments of pure epicness (I know it’s not a word, just stay with me here) and total entertainment, that I couldn’t help but keep my eyes glued to the screen at all times, regardless of what was going on with the story. Good review Jeff.

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