Sword of right Lancelot you rise a knight...

So.....The Dark Knight Rises.

I got one word for it: disappointing.

Now I realize, I'm in the minority with this opinion.  One other person I know of feels the same way, everyone else enjoyed it.  Even Time magazine has a gushing review of it (possibly written by Christopher Nolan's significant other, it's so sycophantic).  But for me, I'm sticking with my original assessment.

There were NUMEROUS little things throughout that bugged me.  If the movie is really good, there ARE no little things like that in it, or the movie's so good, and I'm so wrapped up in it I don't notice those things until the second or sometimes third viewing. But this time, inconsistencies just jumped out at me throughout.


THERE WILL BE SPOILERS UPCOMING!  READ NO FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET!!!!


In no particular oder...


1. Five months Gotham's overrun with people running hither and yon all over, and yet somehow, the Batwing remains on a roof, covered in nothing but camouflage sheeting, untouched.   Wouldn't it make sense that someone would have found it and possibly vandalized or cannabilized it for parts by then?
2. No body can get off the island, but yet somehow Bruce Wayne can get ON to the island?
3. Gordon and company 'exiled' out onto the ice, the thin ice that cracking menacingly.  Next thing we see is a flare laying there, and suddenly, there's Batman standing on the ice as well.  And after that, they all just stand there conversing as if they're on solid ground.  And THEN, and this one made me guffaw out loud in the theater, Gordon throws the lighted flare ONTO the supposedly already thin ice.  Would you really want a heat source burning on top of thin ice?
4. The cops are all trapped underground for 5 months, yet they all emerge clean shaven and with decent haircuts and clean and pressed uniforms.  Good thing some of them apparently moonlighted as barbers and dry cleaners in their spare time.
5. There's but two minutes left until the nuclear bomb explodes and Batman has to get it more than 6 miles away from the city (as that's what the physicist said the blast radius was), BUT....oh let's take time to discuss what might have been with Catwoman and get a kiss from here and THEN...let's take some more time to have a touching, revealing moment with Jim Gordon.  Before we even fire the Batwing up for the journey.
6.  Now I'm not an expert in nuclear blasts, and I'm not sure how far away from the city Batman actually got, but, wouldn't looking at the blast with your bare eyes, like, kinda blind you?  And shouldn't there have been a shockwave that would have hit the city and at least broken a few windows or two?  And shouldn't there have been come kind of dangerously high waves buffeting the city soon after the bomb exploded so low over the water?
7. there were too many similarities with the first movie.  a) Bruce Wayne loses everything, including his mansion burning down in the first one and his fortune in this one. b) Bruce Wayne disappears for a long stretch of time, traveling the world in the first one, in seclusion in his mansion and then to the prison in this one, before the Batman suddenly reappears. c) Gotham, or a portion of it, is cut off from the rest of the outside word by bridges being damaged.  d) People running around in panic all through the streets of the city.    Is there no other story the could have told?  Did they have to recycle so much?
8.  Bane and his guys go into the Stock Exchange in bright daylight.  The shoot some people up, hook up to the computers and are told it'll take, I believe, 8 minutes for everything to be completed.  So they grab hostages and go out into the streets (on motorcycles INSIDE the building that we never SAW taken into the building) and soon thereafter, it's suddenly night time in darkness so deep requiring streetlight and headlights. That was a damn quick sunset.
9. Why the hatred of Gotham by Talia and Bane?  Hatred of Batman, yeah, i can see that, since he 'killed' Ra's.  But their seething hatred of Gotham?  I kinda reasoned this one away a bit by thinking the way to get at Batman best was to destroy Gotham.  But both Talia and Bane railed against Gotham pretty much just because it was Gotham, not so much as a means to hurt Batman.
10. Only way we could reach 'the machine' was through the descending floor of the trailer Fox and Talia used.  Bane had to even blow a hole in the wall to get to the machine.  yet, somehow, Fox makes his way there easily AND as it's swiftly flooding, just climbs up a ladder presumably to the outside and safety.  How secure and secret was that machine if there was such an easy way from it?
11.  And this one, yeah this one I laughed out loud too and bothered me the most.  Let's set the stage.  Bane and his horde of men have three tank things and all of them have at least one machine gun.  Three thousand cops, filling the tight confines of a single street, face them with nothing but billy clubs.  The cops charge.  The bad guys unleash the weapons and....somehow, the cops reach them to engage in hand to hand combat. WTF???  With all that firepower, and the limited area the cops were basically trapped in, all the bad guys had to do was stand their ground and fire and soon there'd be a huge pile of dead cops laying all over that street, probably clogging it.  It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.  There's no way any more than an extremely lucky handful of cops would even have a PRAYER of reaching the bad guys.  Course, that wouldn't have been very Hollywood-esque.  So we'll just ignore common sense and logic. Pffft.

Yes, I readily admit some of these are small nit-picky things.  But I'll further submit, that if the movie was better than it is, if it grabbed me and captured my interest, I wouldn't noticed these things.  Or cared if I did.

I've heard some people say, "Well Bane was a kick-ass villain!"  No, no he wasn't.  He was a large, bulky, strong man in a Darth Vader rebreather who could throw and take punches.  You know who else could have filled that role?  Juggernaut from the third X-Men movie.  Throw the Darth Vader breathing mask on him and give him a silly accent (well he had that kinda silly Australian accent, so maybe that's already done) and he could any and everything Bane did.  Whoop pee.   You could not, however, have put Juggernaut in place of the Joker.  Or Scarecrow from movie.  Or even Ra's himself for that matter.  Because all of those villains were thinking, unique characters with specific motivations and quirks.  They were not simply a muscle bound brick with a stupid facemask.

The Robin thing at the end was cute, or rather cutesy, but ulimately pointless and stupid.  With no Batman, how could you have a Robin?  It would have made much more sense to set Joseph Goron Levitt up as a replacement Batman, which is maybe what they were doing.  But why get all cutesy with the name?  Other than to give the audience members the ability to look at each other smile and say, "Oh, yeah *I* get it!"  Pffft.

The movie was not all bad.  Catwoman, even though she was never called that once in the movie, simply rocked.  Anne Hathaway did an amazing job with that part.  I loved how she goes from one second, flipping over bad guys, using them as shields, kicking them all over the room, and the next second, when the cops bust in, she sits down and screams for help like the stereotypical slasher movie victim.  And then, when the cops ignore her and go on past.  Her face changed and she got up and walked out.  Brillant.  I frankly wish Catwoman had been the main villain.  I wanted to know more about her, where she learned her burglary skills and acrobatics and fighting.  What exactly her relationship was with the blonde girl.  Where she got that ultra-slinky and ultra-sexy....well catsuit.  I'm thinking seeing her in that is something that just MIGHT make a stirring in Uncle Polt's loins...and I'm just as surprised at that as you are.  She handled the batcycle like she was born to it and kicked some serious ass throughout.  And unlike Batman, she did it in high heels!  The movie, in my opinion, was focused in the wrong direction by concentrating on Bane and not her.

Having Talia be the escaping child and not Bane was a surprise to me, and a good one too.  I should have seen that coming, since I know Ra's only ever had a daughter, but they took me surprise there.  If only the rest of the movie could have done so.  And the Joseph Gordon Levitt's Blake character was quite refreshing.  I did enjoy him.  And naturally, nearly EVERYTHING Michael Caine does is superb, his Alfred included.

I think the main problem I had was heightened expectations.  I was expecting another The Dark Knight.  I did not get that.  I suppose, if taken on it's own, all by itself, the movie's not that bad.  But when you're expecting a symphony by Mozart and you get the equivalent of three guys with kazoos and a banjo, well, you're bound to be disappointed.

I would not say this movie is shear dreck and to avoid it (like I would the newest Spider-Man) but I would say....well, be forewarned again: its not Joker-Batman chessmatch.  It's more of an obviously choreographed  and totally fake 'professional' wrestling match.  And it's a disappointment.

Also, there is a trailer for the upcoming Superman movie.  I'm dubious.  They're rebooting it, and somehow, Superman's father is a fisherman on a boat in the ocean.  I'm not aware of any ocean near Smallville Kansas where the Kent's raised Clark Kent.  I may not even be seeing that movie next year.

POLT