The Dark Knight Retires

    When I saw the trailers for The Dark Knight Rises I was intrigued, but also worried. Intrigued because the 'epic conclusion' sounded very final, much more final than most movie series that aren't based on a pre-existing base like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Worried because Tom Hardy's Bane was wearing a mask that covered his mouth, which meant that old deafo over here had two choices; go to the cinema without my hearing aids and risk being unable to understand Bane's dialogue, or go with them and risk being deafened by Death Metal Batman.

"Don't mind me, I'm just trying out for vocalist in Amon Amarth.

Also, do you have any Strepsils?"

   The theme of the movie seemed very current; Bane appeared to be leading some sort of revolution based on tearing down the established order and creating a far more anarchic society. Given last summer's London riots and the recession in general, this promised a very interesting film.

    It more or less delivered. More or less.

    Let's get to the summary, before I start blathering about spoilers and plot points: it's good, it's not as good as the first two Nolan movies. Freeman's still excellent, Oldman's still excellent, there's a couple of surprising twists, Caine is still excellent, Bale's Bruce Wayne still reminds me overwhelmingly of Bale's Patrick Bateman, and Hardy's Bane voice is ridiculous.

    Yes, you heard me, ridiculous.

    All the way through the film, I was trying to think why Bane's voice sounded so bizarre, so completely out of keeping with the man it was apparently emanating from. The first thing is that it doesn't sound at all like it's coming from the same place as everyone else's; obviously it's meant to be coming out from the mask, but the difference when he first spoke was the difference between someone speaking in front of a camera on location and a voice-over done in a studio.

Trust me, I've watched enough nature programmes to recognise the difference.

    Then there's the actual voice itself. It's too... fruity. Bane looks the part, but he doesn't sound menacing. He sounds like a bit of a toff, actually; generally cheerful, with a slightly odd accent that I couldn't place. But now I'm out of the cinema, let me tell you who he sounds like to me.

 "No, Mister Wayne, I expect you to die."

    Whoever it was who did the voice for Gert Frobe's Auric Goldfinger, that's who he sounds like. He doesn't sound German, of course, but otherwise that's the general feel I got from it. Although a friend of mine described it as 'a drunk Patrick Stewart trapped in a cupboard', which is also not a long way off the mark. And let me tell you, that's a very different feel to what I got from the trailers, and what I was expecting. And not in a good way. But enough of my problems with Bane; what about the movie itself? Well, I'm not going to go any further without talking about some SPOILERS so if you haven't watched it yet and want to be surprised, read no further.

    You know how in The Dark Knight, the Joker's plans seem feasible at the time, but when you think about them afterward then actually they probably weren't? That's because you got drawn in by the film and by Ledger's masterful performance. In TDKR, I was watching it going "well... that doesn't really make any sense". For example, Marion Cotillard's 'Miranda' character getting to snog Bruce Wayne after apparently hassling him for... months? Years? about the clean fusion energy plan that turns out to be the key to the whole movie. And then one random rain storm after he's lost all his money and he's prepared to bed down with her. Right.

    Most of the rest of Cotillard's character is well done. She's actually the main antagonist, you see; she's Ra's al Gul's daughter and hates Batman for killing him and wants to destroy Gotham, but you don't get to know this until right at the end. Until then she's just pegged as Disposable Love Interest Who's Not As Hot As Anne Hathaway. That was a very unexpected twist, and it impressed me. But how does she intend to destroy Gotham?

   With a fusion power core that's been turned into a bomb. OK, fine.

"Let me know how that works out for you."

    That she has driven around the isolated city for five MONTHS before it's going to go off. Wait, what?

    Now, Bane's explanation to Wayne as he dumps him into the hell-hole prison that both he and Talia al Gul escaped from is that Gotham will suffer because they'll have hope that they can escape even if it's unobtainable. However, infant student of human psychology as I am, I would argue that that's bullshit. The difference between being in the prison and seeing the apparently reachable sky above but never being able to get up to it (unless you're Talia al Gul or Bruce Wayne) and living out the rest of your days there is VERY different to five months of an anarchic society followed by instant, uncomprehending oblivion in an atom bomb explosion. There's no doom there, no crushing depression of your own failure. There's misery for a while (although a lot of the citizens are portrayed as quite enjoying the new freedoms) and then obliteration. Might as well do it straight off while they're all shitting themselves after you've collapsed the football stadium, which would also prevent Batman from having five months to heal from his... broken back?

"Five months? Fucking amateur."

    Their first fight, Bane beats Batman up, takes his lunch money (well, the R&D department under Wayne Enterprises) and breaks his back. Or something. Leaves a vertebrae protruding, anyway. Which, it so happens, can be fixed by hanging from a rope under your armpits while a prisoner hits you in the back under direction from a failed prison doctor. Who knew? And then you can do a load of press-ups and sit-ups and climb out of a pit and get back to Gotham from... I dunno where. Somehow. Although you have no money. And presumably YOU don't know where you are, either.

    I should point out here that Bane has a whole load of disposable manpower who are prepared to die for him and his cause. Much like Ra's al Gul in Batman Begins, or the Joker in The Dark Knight. Someone even asks at one point "where does he get these guys from?", and it's a question that's never satisfactorily answered. I guess they're League of Shadows members, they're just scruffy killers instead of the dapper ninjas Ra's used. Makes perfect sense.

"At least mine were insane."

    Speaking of Ra's al Gul, Liam Neeson shows up for half a minute in a dream sequence while Bruce Wayne's hanging around waiting for his back to fix up. Not only do dream sequences generally suck, but it's never made clear whether al Gul is meant to be alive again (which I think he could do in the comics) or whether he's some sort of fever dream... in which case he's a fever dream that gives Bruce Wayne accurate information that he could not otherwise have come by. However, also speaking of unexpected cameos, I got a kick out of the appearance of this guy:

Uhhh...

    No, wait, sorry. This guy:

"Death! By exile."

    Cillian Murphy as Dr. Crane turning up as the 'judge' in the 'people's sentencing court' was rather amusing, yet also well done. Both he and Nolan deserve credit for making the Scarecrow into a legitimately unnerving villain in the first film and a useful cameo character in the second two. Another unexpected appearance was the guy who plays Sergeant Wu in Grimm showing up as a police sergeant here. Not getting typecast then, Jimmy?

    Moving on; there's very little to say about the veteran trio of Oldman, Caine and Freeman other than they all deliver excellent, assured performances that anchor the film. Freeman has less to do, of course, mainly needing to be calm and speak in his own voice. Caine's portrayal of Alfred is more haunted and less relaxed than in the previous movies, and the scene where he finally tells Bruce Wayne about the truth of Rachel's choice of Harvey over him is magnificently handled. Oldman has the best of it, of course; his Commissioner Gordon is haunted by his own demons, where he praised Harvey Dent who threatened the lives of his wife and son and used the Act set up in Dent's name to smash organised crime, but he's also a man of relative action. This isn't the 'drive the Batmobile, blow up a pylon' of the first film, this is Gordon who jumps down a manhole in pursuit of thugs, throws himself into a sewer to escape Bane after playing unconscious, gets up out of his hospital bed to shoot the men sent to kill him, and hijacks the bomb truck to place a signal blocker on it. He's the human face of the 'good guys' in the movie, and damn good job he does of it too.

    Now, onto Catwoman.

I don't mean 'onto' literally, but I wouldn't object.

    Anne Hathaway is very attractive, as of course Catwoman needs to be. Well, as any costumed heroine or villainess needs to be in any hero/superhero movie, comic, TV depiction or pretty much anything, really, whereas their male counterparts can be attractive or otherwise as need demands. That's cos it's mainly heterosexual men running these things, innit. Kyle (she's never called Catwoman, only referred to in a couple of headlines as a mysterious jewel thief nicknamed 'The Cat') even has heels on her outfit, which is bloody ridiculous in such a generally reality-based series as Nolan's. However, visual appeal aside, Hathaway does an excellent job of portraying Selina Kyle as a largely amoral thief who does (surprise surprise) turn out to have some morals in the end. It's never entirely clear why she's stealing so much in the first place, though, something about owing the wrong people but we don't know who or why, really. But this aside, her performance is a good one, swerving expertly through the degrees between slinkily confident and desperately uncertain as needed. And now let me move on from her to detail my main problem with this film.

    Batman's a glory-seeking idiot, Bane's a fool, and Gotham would have been fine if Selina Kyle was in charge.

    Batman doesn't use guns. He doesn't use guns. Yet after eight years out of the field and with a strapped-up knee to boot, he goes down into the underground to engage Bane in single combat. Sure, Kyle leads him there and double-crosses him, but it's not like he wasn't after a confrontation anyway. Alfred warned him about it, but still Bruce Wayne goes after Bane and gets his arse handed to him. If he'd taken a gun, he might have been able to kill Bane. OK, he'd have been shot down by Bane's goons but he doesn't fear death and, here's the important part, as far as he knew that would have been an end to it. He doesn't know about Talia al Gul at that point, Bane's the enemy. Ignore your pride, shoot the fucker, end of story. But noooo, Batman has to do his hand-to-hand act and ends up handing the city and an atom bomb over to the lunatic.

"I am disappoint, son."

    Meanwhile, Bane's nearly as bad. So you want to punish Batman, BIG FUCKING DEAL. The guy's resourceful and you're being sloppy. Kill him, or at the very least keep him where you can always keep an eye on him. Let him watch you destroy Gotham from inside Gotham rather than on a TV in a prison somewhere miles away where you have no clue what he's doing. Joker gets away with his "I can't kill you because you're too much fun" because The Joker is chaos incarnate. The Joker's just having fun, pushing at humanity from different angles to see what breaks, he has no agenda beyond what he decided to do this morning. Bane has a very specific, set plan that he intends to follow which comes from someone else's agenda, and he endangers it by taking some time out to impose some theoretical punishment not only on Gotham but on Batman. SLOPPY.

"Oh you!"

    Selina Kyle shows up as Bane is about to kill Batman and blows him away with the Batpod's cannons straight away. Bang, crispy villain, solved. It's basically the moment in Star Wars where Han Solo shows up and blows up one TIE fighter and sends Vader careering off in the other direction; idealistic but hopelessly outmatched 'hero' has their life saved by a mercenary you're meant to think has fucked off and left them to their fate. That's the sort of approach Gotham needed, not some self-righteous prick in a cape getting all moral high-ground about guns and failing fairly abjectly as a result.

    All that said, the second fight scene between Batman and Bane, where Batman knows to target Bane's mask and knocks out the painkilling gas is well-done; Bane's fighting becomes much more vicious and uncoordinated as a result, and the contrast is clear.

    I know this is dragging on a bit, the film is nearly three hours, give me a break.

    ANYWAY, in conclusion the intrepid heroes can't get the core back into the reactor to prevent it from detonating and so Batman uses his 'Bat' helivehicle to take it out over the sea and allows it to blow up and he dies and boo-hoo it's all very sad. Only in the Second Big Twist it turns out that he didn't actually die, because he'd fixed an autopilot that Fox had said was broken and...

...I dunno. You tell me how having autopilot saves you from a megatonne atom bomb that's gone off a mere five seconds or so after you disappeared from view. I mean, really? Where did you get to in those five seconds after you ditched it? More than the six mile blast radius? That's impressive speed on your flying vehicle, sir. I call bullshit. But Alfred sees him and he's happy and is with Selina Kyle, but that's all Alfred needs to know. Which personally, I think is more bollocks. Nolan should have killed Batman. That would have been truly defining for the series, even if it was the last one and DC reboot in another eight years or so. Did he never intend to? Did he get cold feet? Did DC veto it? I have no idea. But he should have done, instead of taking the easy way out. The thing is, it's not like Wayne needs to survive, because he's done being Batman anyway and there's this guy to take over:

"Hey, you just met me, and this is crazy,

But I'm in this film a lot, so ignore the lack of background maybe?"

    I've got no fucking clue why John Blake is in this movie, really. He doesn't really do much except work out who Batman is years ago when he's a kid, keep it to himself, get all moral over Gordon when he finds out that Gordon lied about Harvey Dent's death, and run around a bit figuring things out too late to be any use and getting into scrapes that he needs to be rescued from. Oh, and at the end, Wayne's will requires all of Wane Manor to be left 'untouched', which means Blake is free to find the entrance to the Batcave and all the equipment. But there's a problem with that, too. See, OK, his middle name is 'Robin'. But it's all very well having Batman's shit, but not if you've not got Batman's mind to make it work. And not if you haven't got Lucius Fox to repair and redesign it for you. And not if you haven't got Alfred to help out, lend a hand, stitch you up afterwards and so on. And not if you haven't got Bruce Wayne's money to get around these problems in other ways. Basically, Blake has stumbled across a small armoury that he doesn't know how to use, can't repair and can't replace. Have fun, boyo.

    For me, the film needed to end after the scene where Fox, Alfred and Gordon are at Bruce's headstone, or possibly when Gordon sees the Batman statue unveiled. Everything else after that smacked of the happy-ending bullshit that ruined the cinematic release of Blade Runner. Bruce Wayne was an idiot and didn't deserve a happy ending, although I'm kind of glad that Alfred didn't end up feeling like such a total failure.

   So that's my long and incredibly rambling review of a long and fairly rambling film. It boils down to decent entertainment with some excellent performances and a couple of very unexpected twists, but most of the characters could have achieved their intended goals a hell of a lot easier than how they actually went about it, and that sort of ridiculousness REALLY bugs me.