Jeepers, Batman! This review is full of SPOILERS! Let's get started!
Oh, Nolan, really? We waited so long, and, really? The Dark Knight was called groundbreaking for a reason. It was not a superhero movie. It was a crime drama that happened to feature superheroes. Like it or not, it was plausible, and that's what made it so fascinating. You could actually believe that someone like the Joker would exist, and it would take someone like Batman to stop him.
Whereas this final installment in Nolan's Bat-trilogy..... is silly. That may sound like sacrelige, but it's the truth. And under ordinary circumstances, that would be fine. Superhero movies are supposed to be silly. This summer's other major blockbuster, The Avengers, was splendidly, gloriously silly, and I enjoyed every minute of it. But alas, unlike that film, this was not a silly movie enjoying itself, this was a silly movie taking itself very, very seriously.
Following a rather weak duel of airborne spies, leading to the reveal that yes, our villain this film is a bulked-up dude with a gas mask and a growly Sean Connery voice, we open at stately Wayne Manor, for the eighth annual Harvey Dent Day banquet, sponsored by Bruce Wayne, who has become a Howard Hughes-esque recluse following his hanging up the cape for good. Now, dear readers, I want you to take a good look at that last sentence and just try not to giggle. Thankfully, this scene also introduces one of the films saving graces- Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman.
Many expressed doubt when Hathaway's casting was announced, wondering if she would attempt to channel Michelle Pfeiffer's beloved, unstable Catwoman from the Burton films. Well, she doesn't. She goes back a little farther into Bat-history, and channels the sly cat burglar played by the wonderful Eartha Kitt on the Adam West show, with a splash of champagne socialism as a chaser, and it is awesome. Next to Christian Bale's oddly sluggish Bruce Wayne, Hathaway sparkles. She and Michael Caine, who is always wonderful as an emotionally-charged Alfred, seem to be the only ones who put their hearts into this film- odd, as Caine is famously on the record as saying he is in the industry purely for the money.
Anyways, the Evil Plan That Must Be Stopped in this film involves Bane trying to- let me get this straight- discredit Bruce Wayne and then steal his special clean energy machine so that he can convert it into a nuclear weapon, hold Gotham hostage, plunge it into popular anarchy, and eventually blow it up, as per the wishes of Liam Neeson from the first movie. Um, okay then. With silly last-minute plot twists courtesy of Marion Cotillard, the Wayne Industries board member who climbed out of the woodwork! Oy vey.
The plot holes start seeping in at this point. For instance, Bane had already kidnapped a nuclear scientist; wouldn't it be simpler to just build a bomb of his own than go through the trouble of stealing Bruce Wayne's energy machine to turn it into a bomb? And Bruce and Selina are well aware of each other's secret identities; why does Bruce persist in using that ridiculous growly-bear voice?
This is not to say the film is terrible, or even necessarily bad; in its place it's a distinctly entertaining popcorn movie whose pleasures include not only Alfred and Catwoman but some very exciting special effects (a bat-signaled flaming bridge comes to mind), and cameo from Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow that had all us fangirls cheering, and a fun little character played by Nolan favorite Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Just ignore the half-assed quasi-economic philosophizing, Gordon-Levitt's secret identity at the very end, and a laughably ugly Bat-statue unveiled in one of the final scenes. But really, the trouble with this movie is that it could have been so much better if it didn't think it was great.
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