Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back. First, the good news about The Dark Knight Rises. Anne Hathaway excels as the best Catwoman ever, and the banter between her and Batman crackles. There are some exceptional CGI effects of Manhattan’s partial destruction. There’s a cool personal hovercraft, the Bat, and an equally cool combo motorcycle/cannon, the Batpod.
Unfortunately, that’s all the good stuff in director Christopher Nolan’s newest chapter of the Batman saga. The problem is the screenplay, dotted with the corniest of dialogue and laden with pretentious Batman mythology. When Catwoman tells him “you don’t owe these people any more! You’ve given them everything!”, Batman solemnly replies, “Not everything. Not yet.”
The plot simply exists to transition from action set piece to action set piece. There are too many times, when a good guy is in peril, that another good guy pops up utterly randomly and just in the nick of time – too many even for a comic book movie.
With her bright wit and lithe sexiness, Hathaway fares far better than her colleagues. Christian Bale continues his odd husky growl as Batman. As the villain, an uber buffed Tom Hardy glowers from behind a fearsome mask. The hackneyed screenplay wastes the rest of the extremely talented cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman. We barely glimpse Liam Neeson. The captivating Juno Temple is apparently dropped into the story just enough to set her up for the sequel with Gordon-Levitt.
I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, which worked well for the long shots of NYC and made the fight scenes more chaotic.
