(Note: there are going to be some mild spoilers here so if you haven't yet see The Dark Knight Rises go and see it, then come back).
When the lights dim just before a movie starts, I'll often wonder how I'll feel when the final credits roll. Elated? Relieved? Disappointed? Enraged?
After the Avengers post-credit sequence, I actually cheered. Yes, cheered. So did a few other people in the audience. I wanted to watch it again. I was annoyed that there wasn't another Avengers movie right now.
To put it bluntly, The Dark Knight Rises is no Avengers. It isn't The Dark Knight and to be honest isn't even really Batman Begins. Despite how much I wanted it to be the best of the three, it is the weakest of Christopher Nolan's trilogy. There just isn't that sense of depth, purpose, and gravitas that the other two have. The story is oddly put together and unfortunately the movie itself isn't strong enough for that to be overlooked.
First, the good. Anne Hathaway is fan-freaking-tastic. I had always shrugged when I saw an Anne Hathaway movie because I found her playing the same characters - the flawed, inherently-good-but-out-of-place character (see The Devil Wears Prada or The Princess Diaries). They don't once mention 'Catwoman' in the movie but the icons are there - the suit, the ears, and the mannerisms. She's channelling more Lee Meriwether than Michelle Pfeiffer and does a great job of bringing back the girl power aspect of the role (as opposed to Batman Returns, where Selina Kyle was a crazy cat lady who went psycho).
Also, Gary Oldman is brilliant as Commissioner Gordon. I loved how the events of The Dark Knight reverberate throughout this movie, with Gordon haunted by the guilt of blaming Two Face's crime spree on Batman. More on that later.
What didn't work? Well, like a partygoer watching someone walk in wearing an outfit that four sizes too small for them, I was wondering if Rises was going to talk about the elephant in the room. You know, The Joker. I was disappointed that despite that character causing untold chaos in Gotham and turning Batman into public enemy number one, he doesn't receive a mention, or even an off-handed comment (Joss Whedon did a great job of that with Natalie Portman's character in Avengers). I know that this was probably a mark of respect from Nolan to Heath Ledger but at least some reference would have provided closure on the character.
Also, Bane (who was the character in name only, really) just wasn't as interesting as either Ledger's Joker or even Liam Neeson's Ra's al Ghul. Bane does what Bane has been leading up to do ever since it was announced he was going to be in the movie, thus kicking off the titular rise of the Dark Knight.
Which leads me into something I alluded to earlier - the structure of the story is a bit messy and unfortunately the movie isn't good enough to cover it up (see Inception). The story opens eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Batman has been M.I.A. over that time and the first hour of the movie focuses on Bruce Wayne rediscovering Batman. Which makes it all a bit odd when Bane does his thing and we find ourselves following Bruce Wayne as he rediscovers Batman, again. What the hell was I just watching for the last hour, then? There have been a few complaints that the movie was a bit too long and I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it has, in effect, a false start.
I also found it a bit odd (not in a bad way, just odd) that Nolan seems to throw in a whole lot of nods to the source material that he was going out of his way to avoid with the last two, including something obvious with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character that anyone familiar with the mythos could see coming a mile off.
All in all, the movie was okay. No, that's unfair. It was good. I wanted it to be fantastic, I wanted Rises to be Nolan's magnum opus but it comes off being all the more disappointing because it just doesn't rise to the challenge. Go and see it, by all means, just don't expect any cheering at the end.
