Film review: The Dark Knight Rises

By Siobhan Synnot
Published on 22/07/2012 00:10

I DON’T know if you heard, but there’s a new Batman movie out this week that is supposed to be one of the darkest and unsettling superhero movies made.

The Dark Knight Rises (12A) ***

Director: Christopher Nolan

Running time: 164 minutes

It’s particularly disturbing for film reviewers; hardcore Batfans have been attacking critics for negative reviews because it’s easier to issue an anonymous batwa over a ­movie than take out the bins like their mother asked.

Picking up eight years from where The Dark Knight left off, Christopher Nolan’s new film finds Gotham in a state of relative peace after Batman takes the rap for the actions of District Attorney Harvey Dent, so that the city could have a ­martyr and retain a belief in law enforcement.

Now billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is a limping recluse, mourning the loss of Rachel (Katie Holmes, then Maggie Gyllenhaal) and protected from the outside world by loyal Alfred (Michael Caine). Compared with Batman, even the Incredible Hulk looks like a song and dance man.

What Wayne needs is a wake-up call, and it comes in the bald, barrel-chested shape of new villain Bane (Tom ­Hardy), who wears a black leather gas mask over much of his face that could garner ­admiring glances at the most jaded S&M dungeon.

Looking like something from World Wrestling ­Federation and sounding like Vincent Price on speakerphone, naturally he has a fiendishly complicated plan to save Gotham from greed and government corruption by crushing its denizens of hope and then life. One ploy decimates Bruce Wayne’s fortune, but Bane’s main setpiece is a siege which constantly references the French revolution with him as Robespierre, just in case we thought Nolan had pleb tastes.

As in the previous two films, The Dark Knight Rises frequently mistakes gloom for emotional gravity, with Bale as a baseline for dreariness, down to the voice that drops an octave once the cowl goes on. Whenever plummy Bane confronts gravelly Batman, Nolan’s fussy soundscape suggests Brian Blessed and Clint Eastwood having a furious moral philosophy dingdong in a well-tiled bathroom.

Only Anne Hathway doesn’t perform as if she’s been manacled to a boulder. Her cat burglar Selina Kyle is never actually called Catwoman but her night-vision goggles look like cat’s ears, and she often wears a mask. Mind you, almost every­one in this movie wears a mask of some sort, but unlike everyone else, Selina never trots out her hard luck backstory. This makes her vital and intriguing, as does her unexplained pretty blonde girlfriend (Juno Temple).

The Dark Knight Rises is not a bad film; I love that the ­director and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, are ambitious for superhero stories to be more than just clashes between good and bad costumes, but his trilogy struggles to balance character and momentum with exposition. One example is Marion Cotillard’s philanthropist, who offers a rudimentary romantic interlude but is largely required to set up the instability of the film’s nuclear McGuffin – although once placed in a spherical casing on a chain, apparently the four-megaton device can be swung around the streets of Gotham like a conker.

There are magnificently staged setpieces, including a football field which falls away from under the players’ feet, and a Bond-style aircraft heist over the Cairngorms, and the film certainly gathers thrillpower in the final hour. Also stirring is the film’s habit of hovering meditatively over a collapsing Gotham, echoing Nolan’s godlike view as he presides over incoherent political allegories and IMAX-sized plotholes. It’s a Dark Knight all right, but it never really ­rises.

• On general release