‘The Dark Knight Rises’, the third and (reportedly) final Batman film from director Christopher Nolan is a massive one, full of anarchic uprising, mass annihilation, and city-scale destruction.
The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, and apparently Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has given up his Batman days and turned into kind of a shut-in. Bummer. Gotham City seems to be getting along fine without him — until muzzled bad guy Bane shows up to execute a plot so trippy that it could have only been developed by Hollywood.
Bane is played by Tom Hardy, who got into RIDICULOUS shape for the role, did an excellent job of making us forget about how 1997s ‘Batman and Robin’ totally fucked up the character. It sucks that they didn’t really mention the Venom drug in the movie. Hardy did an amazing job making Bane an intelligent and calculating adversary for the Caped Crusader.
The super-hot Anne Hathaway occasionally appears in the plot as cat burglar Selina Kyle. Even though she’s supposed to be the newest Catwoman, we noticed that no one ever calls her Catwoman in the movie. Which was kind of weird. We think that she should have had more screen time to make us forget about Halle Berry’s Catwoman, but we’re fine with what we got. Other characters that make an appearance are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as intrepid police officer John Blake, old standbys Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), technological bad-ass Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and Bruce Wayne’s trusty butler buddy Alfred (Michael Caine).
One of the things that we liked is that despite some poetic licenses, The Dark Knight Rises built a decent script, taking major plot points of the “Vengeance of Bane” storyline from DC Comics. The movie clocks in at over 2 1/2 hours long, and unlike its predecessors, you actually notice how long the movie is. It’s pretty slow in some areas, and probably needed a Rocky-esque montage, but in the end it’s well worth the wait.
Ultimately, if you haven’t seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, you should. You won’t be disappointed.
Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
