Review: 'Dark Knight Rises' has lots of dark slam-bang action
PG-13; 3 1⁄2 stars (out of 4)
"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."
"Batten down the hatches," indeed. Even Selina Kyle (Catwoman) - the cat burglar-turned-agent-provocateur who introduces herself to Bruce Wayne by robbing him - can't resist an easy Bat-pun. But that's about as much levity as you'll get from writer/director Christopher Nolan's trilogy-ending epic, "The Dark Knight Rises." The rest is all hopeless battles, impending cataclysm and unrelenting doom.
Nolan has finally pushed the hard-boiled pulp fiction origins of Batman through film noir, and into uncertain territory beyond. One begins to wonder if his own sympathies really lie with the villains, whose delight in mayhem, murder and crafting elaborate apocalypse tend to make Batman's heroic struggles seem secondary.
Wayne starts the film as a recluse, his Bat-persona gathering dust in the basement. He took the fall for Harvey Dent - the crusading district attorney who became the psychopath Two-Face - so that Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) can break the back of organized crime through the Dent Act.
We meet Bane (Tom Hardy) through one of the most inventive action sequences in recent memory. Bane is a mountain of muscle, roaring his amusement through a mechanical mask. He's introduced as a prisoner of the CIA, hustled aboard a plane, where his interrogators try to intimidate him but he manages a spectacular escape.
Wayne is dragged out of his self-imposed exile by his run-in with Selina Kyle, unable to resist a good cat-and-mouse chase (so to speak). Organized crime has been silenced, but ominous rumblings below the city indicate that all is not well in Gotham.
Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - a smart young cop and an orphan, like Wayne - makes the Wayne/Batman connection, and pleads for his return.
Then the underworld rises, literally, assisted by explosives. Bridges are blown. Tunnels are sealed. There's no way in or out. Bane opens the prisons, and invites the underclass to take their revenge on their betters. They do.
This Gotham City is fraught with political portent - pundits will likely see shades of Occupy Wall Street in Bane's assault on the stock exchange, or the greedy machinations of the 1 percent in the corrupt executives who bring him to power. This is more likely an attempt to play on contemporary anxieties than it is to further a specific agenda, though.
At two hours and 45 minutes, "Rises" never drags. In fact, it seems a little short at times, like pieces are missing. Bane's back story and motivation are given surprisingly short shrift, and he isn't the only one.
Nolan's penchant for ever-twistier plot twists gets the better of him a few times, and the audience is asked to swallow at least one incredible sci-fi MacGuffin too many.
Still, the performances are so convincing - particularly Hathaway, who seemed miscast at first - that it's hard not to just give in and accept whatever over-the-top event is coming next.
