The Dark Knight Rises is a good movie.
It is a well plotted, ambitious film with key set pieces to
match the immense scope of Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham city as an
amalgam of every giant USA metropolis you’ve ever seen. He populates the vision with a highly talented
cast of actors capable of carrying the city to great heights.
So why, during the first 45 minutes or so, did my heart
start racing? Why did it feel like the
oxygen was slowly being sucked out of the room?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the suspense or the dramatic tension. It was the lack of both.
That’s right, I went into full on Geek Panic.
Very little in the film’s intro was working for me and all I
could see was a flashing red BAT symbol in the sky and no Batman (in real life
OR the movie)to come and save me from what was going to be another boring two
hours of stuff that falls just short of being good.
Make no mistake, expectations were very high and no one
should apologize for that. Batman Begins
and especially The Dark Knight were consistently terrific action movies on very
serious canvases. Nolan has built a
reputation as a filmmaker who makes very few mistakes with very large budgets
and doesn’t resort to silliness to get his audience. Who else has a record like that?
The first third of the film lacks tension and mystery. The airplane hi-jacking was impressive only in
its scale, not in its execution. You can’t compare this to the opening heist in
The Dark Knight, a creepy montage of clown masked thieves who pop each other
off until there’s only one clown left.
You also can’t
underestimate the importance of Batman himself.
Batman Begins worked because the focus was on Batman becoming Batman and
an excellent rendering of a city plagued by crime and corruption.
The Dark Knight succeeded because Batman met a worthy
adversary. In The Dark Knight, Nolan
used a brilliant performance by Heath Ledger and some great storytelling and
filmmaking to make the Joker, probably the most familiar of all comic book
villains, a mysterious and terrifying force of nature.
In the Dark Knight Rises, he takes one of the most
unfamiliar and mysterious villains (Bane) and through some dubious decision
making, makes him flat and uninspiring.
Bane is a one trick, muscle bound pony.
He can beat people up and give long drawn out monologues that would be
hilarious if this movie were The Incredibles.
I won’t go so far as to say Bane was BAD, but I will say
that he wasn’t a worthy nemesis. The
strange mask may look scary, but it also robbed a crazy, brilliant actor (Thomas
Hardy) of turning in a good performance.
They could have given the role to…say, The Rock, and had
Hardy just do the voice. Or else skip
actors altogether and make him a digital creation like The Hulk. Without facial expressions and a human voice,
Bane is hardly a real presence as the villain.
His voice is a curious combination of Sean Connery, Darth
Vader and the villain from Penelope Pittstop. Go ahead and look up Snidely
Whiplash on youtube. You’ll see. Go ahead.
It’s comical. In a serious,
dark movie about a guy who dresses like a bat, there is little room for such mistakes.
Spiderman? You can get away with it. Superman?
Maybe. Ghost Rider? Definitely.
And that’s not all.
Take the somehow rushed and eternal scene between Bruce
Wayne and Alfred having a Lifetime Network conversation in a boring room of
Wayne Manor discussing Dead Rachel from The Dark Knight. If Michael Cain is going to cry in a Batman
movie, you’d better make me believe it.
I didn’t. The melodrama was
cringe inducing. I had to look away, and
it was hard because I was in the front row.
Again, this is a serious scene, a scene that forms Bruce
Wayne/Batman’s motivation even beyond the murder of his parents as a child and
it feels tacked on. Worse than that, it’s
tacked on by a great director and two very talented actors.
This sense of being rushed and yet somehow ponderous and
clumsy pervades many early scenes.
Compare Alfred’s description of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises to Alfred’s
description of the Joker in The Dark Knight.
It’s virtually the same conversation except less cool. Less scary.
Less mysterious. If you’re going
to copy something like that, give it a twist.
Everyone monologues, because you know, monologues show how
important and deep something is. The
problem is all the monologues start sounding like blather and there is no Joker
to freshen things up with a conversation about how he likes to use knives. Heck, there isn’t even much of a Batman
presence to freshen things up.
So it all falls on Anne Hathaway to spice things up and
Thank God she does. Never in a million
geek years (1 geek year = 10 minutes of high anticipation)would I have expected
Hathaway to pull this off, but then again I was skeptical about Heath Ledger as
the Joker and look how that turned out.
Again, Nolan takes a
familiar character and makes it special.
Catwoman has the best lines, (yes, even the best monologues) and delivers
them with a passion and energy everyone else lacks. It’s a shame she disappears for long
stretches, there was something special there.
Joseph Gordon Levitt also makes the most of his role, and
Nolan injects some much needed mystery into his character. Gary Oldman, always reliable, turns in another
understated performance as Commissioner Gordon.
Marion Cotillard also performs
ably in the large cast, her exotic voice and features playing well into the
plot of the movie. Morgan Freeman is
underused compared to the last two films, but it would be silly to blame him
for that.
It’s not all bad. If you could watch The Dark Knight Rises
from an objective distance, the story is magnificent. The plot points are strong and surprising,
with big reveals and excellent tie-ins to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
Having some time to think about it, my nearly terminal Geek
panic kicked in because Nolan took too long to get his enormous machine of a
plot rolling. Once it gets rolling, (yes,
when the explosions start) the movie starts to feel in control and more sure of
itself.
There’s no way to go on without giving away too much of the
plot. I enjoyed the carnage and
explosions and the sheer scale of it all, but watching Nolan tie the movies
together at the end was a real joy, and worth the cost of admission by
itself. And yes… the very end more than
redeems the Michael Cain crying
scene.
And I should remind myself, and anyone else who was sadly
underwhelmed, consider your own geek factor.
I freely and wholly admit my expectations for this film and my love for
The Dark Knight has colored my perception and am willing to admit some distance
may improve it.
And always, always remember: a half-good Nolan film is still
better than the best Michael Bay film.
So there’s that.
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