Real Kato Blog: Movies: The Dark Knight Rises

I was fortunate enough to get to see an early screening of "The Dark Knight Rises", so I figure this is a perfect time to bring back movie reviews to this blog. Chris Nolan's final (well, presumed final, I guess) interpretation of "Batman" has been heavily hyped and anticipated. Hopefully this review will actually be helpful to people thinking of seeing the movie.

First the good: it's a worthy conclusion to "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight". If you're a fan of the previous two movies, you'll almost certainly like this one too. The action is generally engrossing and the characters have some depth. There are some clever plot twists. It was entertaining. And unlike some other recent action movies, it didn't rely solely on an endless parade of explosions to fill the whole movie.

However: what did fill the movie were lots of unnecessary scenes, scenes that should have been left on the cutting room floor. A few seconds into some sequences, I knew what was coming... and then the movie took another ten minutes to play out the obvious. Or, it would state the obvious, then give us ten minutes of exposition about it. It was kind of like a Saturday Night Live sketch. I found myself thinking, "Yes we get that Batman is going to get cornered and then find a way to escape... don't drag it out." But they did drag it out, and that's why the movie is 2 hours and 44 minutes long.

The acting was, at times, wooden; that I blame on direction more than the actors, as everyone was clearly instructed to be MOAR GRITTY. Even the kids in the movie were gritty. There was one note to this movie, a never-ending sea of grit.

And then, there were the occasional unbelievable plot elements, like "wait, how on earth did he get there?", "uh, didn't you see that coming?", or "this was your brilliant plan?" I was willing to accept a few of these, but after a while it got to be too much.

So in short: ambitious and entertaining, but flawed and often predictable. Your enjoyment of this movie will depend on how much you're willing to overlook.

Rating: 3.0 / 5.0

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