Movie review: The Dark Knight Rises, dir Christopher Nolan (2012)

A scene from the movie.

After the interesting opening scenes where a group of terrorists hijack and destroy a CIA plane in mid-air, this film gets bogged down in stodge. A wounded and unwilling Batman has all the cards in the deck stacked against him, a sure sign of a weak script. Massively compounded adversity is one way to describe this phenomenon. Batman's alter ego Bruce Wayne has a bad knee, for a start. Then there's Catwoman who is after Batman, the Gotham police are trying to arrest him, Wayne's butler leaves him, and there's a group of terrorists led by a man with a Russian-sounding name who cause Wayne Enterprises to tank by way of a stock market scam. How much worse can things get for the Caped Crusader? Not much worse, of course, and how he gets out of this mess is supposed to be the best way the filmmakers can think of add some lustre to what must surely be an entirely stale franchise. To me, theirs a mere ploy to elicit sympathy, and it reminds me of how hard John Le Carre worked to elicit sympathy for his dead heroine in the utterly unreadable The Constant Gardener. So this new Batman film stinks. The maudlin replaying of Batman's backstory in the film sucks any life that might remain out of it. I did not watch most of the movie.