2012 - THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, is pretty good

I'm not going to lose much sleep over the careers of multimillion dollar film directors.  But Christopher Nolan must have had his hands full making another Batman film.  After the success of The Dark Knight the studio expected another big Batman film.  Nolan aiming for something a little more serious than The Avengers but since the comic book movie bar wasn't set very high with that film it probably wasn't much of a challenge.

Nolan co-wrote a story that was about terrorism, class warfare and the ethical consequences of vigilante justice.  All of this was stuck into the Batman legend with the expected fights and chases.  That the film is a decent entertainment is probably a tribute to Nolan's storytelling skills.  However this is still a Batman film.

OK on with the criticisms:

1.  Can anyone really understand what the growling Batman and the muffle mouthed super villain Bane are talking about?   The rumor was that Bane's voice was rerecorded after the film's trailer was released.  That's hard to believe and did anyone really listen to what was coming out of mouth of Christian Bale and did anyone understand half of it?

2.  The film is almost three hours long.  I could have easily lost the scenes in the underground prison with the well, they really added nothing to the film.  Also a lot of the film focuses on rookie cop John Blake, most of this stuff could have easily been dropped as well or maybe even The Cat Woman stuff.  I suppose you could say it adds depth to the story but it also adds a whole lot of running time to the film. 

3.  The Dark Knight Rises presupposes everyone has seen the first two films and especially Batman Begins to understand what's going on in this film.   Batman Begins had a pretty stupid plot about vaporizing the water supply of Gotham City apparently the League of Assassins is still trying to vaporize Gotham City in this film.

4.  The ending is basically the same ending as Nolan's previous film Inception talk about lazy.  Nolan has proclaimed he wanted to wrap up the Batman trilogy but surprise surprise there is room for a sequel.

5.  Finally, this is a movie about Batman, this is not an epic tragedy along the lines of King Lear, this is Batman a comic book character.

165 minutes.