- Location: AMC Loews Lakewood Towne Center 12
- When the allegedly immortal Ra's Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) briefly materializes partway through The Dark Knight Rises, I found myself secretly hoping that this would be the crucial push needed to turn everything around. After all, wasn't this the very man who set Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) on the path to don his cape and cowl back in Batman Begins? Who better to provide the film and, for that matter, the entire series with the will to succeed in its final hours? But alas, it was not meant to be. As Ra's apparition fades, the film returns to meandering clumsily through some painfully familiar, post-9/11 territory. Whatever director Christopher Nolan's original intentions, the series has finally become "truly lost."
- This time around, it's a masked villain named Bane (Tom Hardy) who wields fear to terrorize Gotham City. A onetime member of Ra's legendary League of Shadows, Bane now threatens the city's populace with both a nuclear bomb and various more mundane explosive devices attached to bridges and football stadiums. If you're looking to distinguish Bane from earlier series villains, I'd focus on his fashion sense - whereas Ra's was strictly suit and tie and the Joker punk hipster, Bane's leather jacket and body armor are more befitting of a Latin American mercenary. Otherwise, his terroristic motives and techniques are similar to what we've seen before, and it's once again up to Batman to defeat this maniac before Gotham tears itself apart.
- Unlike in previous installments, however, Bruce Wayne is no longer obviously the right man for the job. One gathers from his cane and gaunt appearance that the ensuing eight years since the deaths of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes have not been particularly kind to the now-reclusive billionaire. In fact, it takes a playful thief like Selena Kyle (Anne Hathaway) to get him to emerge from his cave for a few fairly entertaining games of cat-and-bat before Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) finally stumbles upon Bane's sewer-based hideout. Is it just me, or would some locking manhole covers solve a lot of this city's problems? At any rate, master engineer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is still eager to assist Bruce even if the family butler Alfred (Michael Caine) displays a disappointing lack of support, and Batman marches off to discover more about his new foe. Anyone who had heard of Bane prior to the making of this film probably knows how their first confrontation goes.
- With Bane in charge of Gotham and Bruce off recovering in an M.C. Escher-inspired prison, some other characters arise to dominate Gotham's stage. There's Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), for example, whose peek-a-boo haircut, environmental activism, and alluring accent all promise to titillate comic book fans even if her relationship with Bruce Wayne is pretty unconvincing. There's also no-nonsense cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whose role in this film is much more compelling prior to a last-minute, on-the-nose reveal. There is also businessman John Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn) whose resemblance to Bernie Madoff or the Enron guys accidentally garners some sympathy for Bane's brutal methods. If there's a message here about citizen empowerment or the Occupy movement, it's a muddled one at best.
- Unfortunately, "muddled" is probably the key word I would use to describe The Dark Knight Rises. This is surprising to me since Christopher Nolan and writers Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer have traditionally made films with unflinchingly precise and intricate plots, whatever other issues they may have had. In this case, however, the film fills its ample 164-minute runtime with a surfeit of details that don't make sense even by the standards of Nolan's usual comic book and puzzle box logic. It also doesn't help that the film's cinematography and music are far less striking and original than they had been in previous installments. The acting, however, is completely adequate, and you have to give Bale, Hardy, and Hathaway a lot of credit for making masked people even remotely interesting, even if none of the actors get the chance to stand out as Heath Ledger once did. The result is a conclusion to the Batman series that fans neither needed nor deserved. At least I can take some solace in the fact that Nolan created an era in which a mediocre Batman film is a disappointment.
- Matthew Modine, Cillian Murphy, William Devane, and Christopher Judge all have minor roles, although personally I was disappointed that Judge did not play Ubu.
