The dark Nightm Are
It’s bottom-numbingly long. The baddie is a mumbling bore. And the plot’s a pretentious mess. Even Batman can’t escape this disaster
ThIS film has been so eagerly awaited and has such a huge publicity budget that it is certain to be a hit. Most critics mindful of their backs — or, indeed, their fronts — will praise it to the proverbial skies.
The last time I gave a movie like this fewer than five stars, I received death threats from people who hadn’t even seen the film in question. And I gather that one U.S. reviewer who attempted to write a serious analysis of this latest film has already received similar threats for being negative.
I am not being perverse, however, in stating that The Dark Knight Rises has many glaring defects. how far you allow those to interfere with your enjoyment of the movie is, of course, up to you.
First, the positives. Director Christopher Nolan has done an intelligent job, along with his brother Jonathan, of assembling a blockbuster finale that brings back a few supervillains and makes a neat, emotionally satisfying conclusion to his trilogy of Batman films.
The final half- hour is cleverly written and on a spectacular scale. You may have seen a city trashed in many a blockbuster, but never quite like this.
The picture also has the courage to grapple, however superficially, with two big themes: the fear of terrorism and economic collapse.
The bad guy, Bane (Tom hardy), is like an 18th- century French revolutionary hoping to unite the oppressed masses against the capitalists and authorities who have kept them under control for so long. A ‘ people’s court’ dispenses death sentences to anyone deemed reactionary. That’s me done for, then.
I wouldn’t go so far as to claim the film is a political heavyweight, but there are echoes of Dickens’s novels about anarchy and rioting masses, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale Of Two Cities, whose ending is even quoted at the end.
The bad news is, first, that it lasts two hours and 45 minutes, which is astonishingly bloated — and unforgivable in a film that spends a long, ponderous hour getting started, despite a couple of action sequences that don’t involve any heroics by Batman.
When Bruce Wayne, alias Batman ( Christian Bale), eventually rides to the rescue, he comes as a man misunderstood by the public and authorities alike — he’s still blamed for the death of harvey Dent, the architect of the Dent Act, a piece of miracle legislation that has rendered Gotham City virtually crime-free for eight years. Batman has long b been i in di disgrace, apparently crippled physically and by the guilt of having sacrificed his girlfriend, and is living in peaceful retirement.
SO it requires a major suspension of disbelief to understand why the bad guys bother to employ cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne hathaway, in an approximation of the Catwoman role filled by Michelle Pfeiffer) to frame him for an attack on the New York Stock Exchange and ruin him with a number of disastrous investments.
The effect is utterly counterproductive. It puts the fight back into Wayne — much to the concern of his trio of father figures: butler Alfred (Michael Caine), chief of police Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and technical genius Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). Batman’s only able-bodied ally is a freshfaced cop (Joseph h Gordon-Levitt), who pretty much resembles his former chum Robin.
The job of love interest / femme fatale is split between Marion Cotillard, as an amorous member of Bruce Wayne’s management board, and hathaway’s Selina, who appears for most of the movie to be a lesbian but whose girlfriend and cohort (played by Juno Temple) simply disappears, leaving Selina the chance to change personality overnight.
Other unbelievable events include the moment Bane doesn’t kill Batman when he has the opportunity. Sceptics may also ask how it is, in the last 45 minutes, that Batman has a habit of turning up unerringly in the right place at the right time, when for the previous two hours he has been unable to do anything right. Mind you, it’s just as well he does, because otherwise the film might never end. Another fault is that
Bane is a boring villain. heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight was a creepily memorable figure. Bane is just Darth Vader in a hannibal Lecter mask, and his words are practically inaudible.
An over-enthusiastic effects track, poor diction (not only by hardy, hampered by his hockey mask) and what sounds like hundreds of crazed Japanese drummers make large stretches of dialogue incomprehensible. And in case you think I’m going deaf, my 21-year- old son sitting beside me found it just as difficult to hear.
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, Tom Conti turns up and starts relating a back story in an accent that might as well be in Serbo-Croat.
As with all recent Batman films, the tone is humourless, bordering on reverential. There are even mythic echoes of Jesus Christ coming to save humanity, and it’s a tribute to Bale’s acting that he endows the role with agonised sincerity, even when he is asking us to believe in the wildly incredible.
Anyone who can’t see enough big, loud movies that don’t make sense can safely disregard this review. But the first of the trilogy, Batman Begins ( which received four stars from me), remains the high point.
The Dark Knight Rises is not as repellently sadistic as its immediate predecessor, but it has pretensions vastly beyond its capabilities.
a VerSION of this review appeared in earlier editions.