THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: Batshit

This review was requested by Don Rebel. Many thanks to Don for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
Cast: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Modine
Runtime: 164 mins.
2012

By all accounts, Christopher Nolan was devastated by the death of Heath Ledger. It would be garish and unproductive to speculate too much about what the third and final film in Nolan's Batman trilogy would have accomplished if it weren't for this tragedy, though we can't help but wonder. The Dark Knight Rises is a movie with heart, perhaps more than any other film in Nolan's oeuvre, but it is not a film made by an artist whose heart is invested. One can imagine a culminating film with four major factions: the police, the Batman, the ideological warfare of Bane, and the anti-ideological chaos of Joker. Such a film could have lived up to the 'battle for the soul of Gotham' moniker that Rises attempts to fulfill, and such a film may have even justified the epic two hour forty-four minute runtime. This is not that film.

What we get instead is a shaggy beast that shoots for the stars and too often lands in the mud. The predominant characteristic of the narrative is confusion. Motivations are baffling, goals are incoherent and often outright hidden, entire subplots exist detached from the movie around them, and the massive rubber band ball of themes contradicts itself too many times to count. This is most apparent in the gradual unveiling of the central villain, Bane (Tom Hardy). At first Bane and his cultists gain power by working with the corrupt corporate class of Gotham, but this is meant to hide their real plan: to empower the underclass to revolt against the rich, powerful 1%ers. This plan is, in turn, a masquerade for yet another even more secreter plan to blow up the entire city with a nuclear bomb after demonstrating to the world... that people will turn violent if they are trapped and threatened with death, I guess? This plan becomes even more convoluted when it is revealed that Bane was not its architect, but rather a lapdog for the even most secretest villain, the abysmally performed Talia Al Ghul (Marion Cotillard), daughter of the late Ra's Al Ghul (Liam Neeson), who has been disguised as a wealthy socialite, but who is actually the boss/mother/daughter figure of Bane.

...what? So little of this plot fluff is necessary or compelling that I honestly believe the artists could have achieved a much superior film by hewing off a full hour of runtime. Bane could have remained a fun cartoony menace rather than being robbed of his agency in the eleventh hour, Talia could have been removed without a second glance, and so many other loose ends could have been bundled up more or less satisfactorily.* Yet, that's not the movie the studio demanded, and that's not the movie the fans wanted to see, so we are left with this bereaved, half-hearted epic to try to untangle.

*I promise this is my last piece of speculation, but... could the nonsensical flip-flopping of Bane be indicative of an original plan for two distinct villains, Bane and Joker, that was forced to collapse into one indistinct villain?

I use the villains as a centerpiece example of the clumsiness that pervades TDKR, but other examples abound. Why does Bruce (Christian Bale) spend so much time building up to re-becoming Batman, only for his broken back to force him to repeat the same exact arc? Why is the passage of time incoherent to the point of distraction? Why are some scenes underlit to obscurity, and why is the sound mixing so catastrophically bad? We are propelled forward by tense scenes and Hans Zimmer's insistent score, but at some point the false starts and non sequiturs force us to reflect on how we got here and where we're going.

This sloppiness is so uncharacteristic of Nolan, whose career is defined by conceptual rigor and clockwork precision. TDKR is often saddled with the undesirable moniker of 'worst Christopher Nolan film' for a reason. I will change my tune now, though, because I don't want to give the impression that the movie is an out-and-out disaster. If you don't focus on how all of the parts work (or rather, fail to work) together, many of the individual pieces are a ton of fun. Bane is one of these. Until the regrettable final act, he does his best to hold the film together with sheer charismatic menace. No small task for Hardy, whose dialogue was so muffled by the mask that they had to re-record most of his lines after a disastrous IMAX extended preview. Bane smartly offers what the Joker did not: a wily enemy who is also an intimidating physical threat. Hardy's physicality is top notch as usual. He's the sort of actor who can do much with little AND much with much. I'm recalling one scene in which he menaces a businessman by lightly resting an open hand by his ear and purring, "Do you feel in charge?" It's a totally unique gesture, frightening and believable.

Hardy is doing fun work, but he's edged out by Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. Hathaway's performance is classic sardonic femme fatale stuff, but she pulls it off with aplomb. Her early scenes all hinge upon shifting power dynamics. Hathaway shifts registers on a dime, playing the innocent maid, the damsel in distress, the master criminal, and the self-righteous revolutionary depending on what suits her best in any given moment. This dynamic performance is the source of most of the best jokes in the movie, which otherwise offers Nolan's lamest attempts at comic relief. Her character becomes window dressing halfway through the film, much to its detriment. Hathaway livens up the film whenever she's onscreen, and her early monologues are also some of the only times the movie has some grip on the commentary that it's trying to make.

The other MVP is Michael Caine reprising his role as Alfred. The script does him dirty, giving him a measly amount of screentime and asking him to deliver weepy cliches. I'll be damned if Caine doesn't somehow spin a heartbreaking performance out of the dreck; that's what six decades of acting experience can do for you.

All of these concerns are somewhat secondary when evaluating a superhero blockbuster. If you've got great setpieces, much can be forgiven. TDKR does not have great setpieces, but what's there is solid enough. Where Batman Begins feels suffocated and The Dark Knight feels cramped, aesthetics which fit both of those movies very well, The Dark Knight Rises has a much grander scope. Ideally you would watch the film in IMAX to maximize the enjoyment of the sweeping Batwing shots and the incredible climactic imagery of colliding urban armies. Cinematographer Wally Pfister does a great job of carving out a distinct visual identity for the film. The bright, open, snowy streets of Pittsburgh make for a very different flavor of Gotham than the doomy gloomy Chicago imagery of The Dark Knight. It's telling, though, that the film's very best setpiece is a back-to-basics scene of one-on-one fisticuffs in a dark sewer chamber.

The Dark Knight Rises tries to do so much, too much. The result is a scatterbrained movie that is alternately engaging and laughable.** But one can see, and often enjoy, the ways that Nolan is trying to portray a more humanist Batman than he had in the past, while also bringing the much-loved trilogy to a fan-servicing conclusion. Its successes and failures are ambitious and sometimes quite weird, which makes it far more appealing in my book than its more paint-by-numbers comic book contemporaries.

**The entire climactic sequence, from the neutering of Bane, to the melodramatic Talia death-throes, to Batman getting blown up by a nuke, is just inconceivably wrongheaded.

2.5 / 5  BLOBS