The Dark Knight Rises Review

The first word I would use to describe The Dark Knight Rises is ‘dense’. For an action movie, for a superhero movie, for a movie, there’s just a lot going on. You probably don’t need to be told that The Dark Knight Rises is the third and final chapter in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and it has the responsibility first and foremost to see that the series goes out with a bang. This is does with energy and ambition, with the final third of its nearly three-hour runtime in particular upping the ante over what came before. As a standalone movie, it’s not quite as successful as its precursor The Dark Knight, but it should still provide plenty to chew on until such time as a producer gets the bright idea to reboot Batman yet again. So at least four years.

The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after the end of The Dark Knight. Batman has gone into retirement after taking the blame for the death of crusading district attorney/horribly disfigured psychopath Harvey Dent, and in his absence the Gotham City PD has cleaned up the streets with the help of the crime-fighting Dent Act. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, as if you didn’t already know) has become a Howard Hughes-ian hermit who holes up in his mansion to nurse his many, many grudges. I’ll freely admit that I love this take on the character, mainly because it allows him a number of glaring flaws in which I don’t think most superhero stories would indulge. You wouldn’t see Superman pulling this shit.

It’s that kind of expectation-busting antics that have set Nolan’s take on the Batman universe apart from others. He’s brought the Batman story as close to reality as it’s ever likely to get, and in doing so has given it a gravity that other superhero movies, even the good ones, just haven’t matched. Take the movie’s villain, Bane (Tom Hardy). Bane is a prison-born would-be freedom fighter intent on tearing down Gotham City as an act of indictment against the rotting, corrupt society he believes it to represent. To this end, he attacks the stock market, blows up a football game, and drags the wealthiest Gothamites out of their palatial estates to be beaten and publicly hanged. You don’t need to pay close attention to the headlines to know that Nolan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, is pushing some very specific buttons here. He’s made the story immediate in a way that a movie about a guy in a funny cape isn’t expected to be.

So the movie doesn’t lack for ideas, and that’s a great thing. It is not, unfortunately, quite as tight in the pacing department. For starters, the cast of the movie is one or two extras away from becoming too big to manage. Besides Batman, other returnees include faithful manservant Alfred (an effectively understated Michael Caine), gadget guru Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and the venerable Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). Fresh blood arrives in the form of conflicted cat-burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), do-gooding beat cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Wayne Enterprises board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard). Each of these players get their moment to shine, with Caine, Hathaway, and Gordon-Levitt doing the most with what’s given to them, but in the early going it’s a bit difficult to remember who’s working for who and why and when.

And it almost goes without saying that no character dominates the movie like Heath Ledger’s Joker did in the previous film. Tom Hardy is effectively implacable as Bane, but he’s not quite as terrifying as the script keeps insisting and his importance is diminished by a latter-half twist that leaves the movie without a villainous core. But maybe that’s intentional. While The Dark Knight focused on Batman’s most famous enemy, The Dark Knight Rises returns the focus to Batman himself, who spends the middle stretch of the movie doing some painful-looking soul searching before coming back stronger than ever.

Indeed, the final forty-five or so minutes of the movie are where it really takes off. Nolan’s vision of a modern city as war zone is thrilling and kind of scary, and the scenes involving giant crowds of combatants deliver something we hadn’t seen before. I’m even willing to ignore the whiff of sequel-bait given off by the ending on account of how successfully most of the threads are resolved. With these movies, Christopher Nolan and team have done a good thing for the credibility of superhero stories, and his latest sends the series off into the sunset with its head held high. Now begins the wait for the inevitable Batman reboot come 2018.