During a function celebrating the late Harvey Dent at Wayne Manor, Selina Kyle (Anna Hathaway) posing as a waitress, brakes into a safe of Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) and steals his mother's necklace. After she escapes, kidnapping a congressmen in the process, he realises that the brake in wasn't to steal the necklace, but rather to steal his fingerprints.
Patrol officer John Blake (Joesph Gordon-Levitt) assists police commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman) in trying to recover the kidnapped congressmen, and in the process Gordon comes face to face with Bane (Tom Hardy), a mercenary hired by John Daggett, Wayne's business rival. Gordan escapes, but is shot, and Wayne realises that, with the use of his fingerprints stolen by Selina, that Daggett is attempting to take over his crumbling company Wayne Enterprises. Wayne, who has confined himself to Wayne Manor for eight years, is forced to take matters into his own hands when Bane attacks the stock exchange and engineers risky investments in Bruce's name, bankrupting Bruce and forcing him to relinquish control of Wayne Enterprises. Wayne entrusts Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) to keep full control out of Daggett's hands. She's the creator of a clean energy project designed to harness fusion power that Wayne Enterprises funded before shutting down the project, after learning that the core could be modified into a nuclear weapon. Bane kills Daggett to take control of his infrastructure, and Wayne, as Batman is forced to confront the mercenary, unprepared for the fight he faces, or the link to his past Bane shares.
The entire film's cast is solid. Christian Bale always brings gravitas to Bruce Wayne/ Batman, and Tom Hardy is menacing as Bane, although both suffer slightly because of their respective voices. Anne Hathaway is perfect as the femme fatale Catwoman, Michael Caine provides a very emotional and heartfelt performance as Alfred, and Gary Oldman is as good as ever as the police commissioner with a guilty conscience. Similarly, the film looks great. The set and costume design, the special effects, Batman's ever impressive artillery of weapons and gadgets, and the heavily choreographed action scenes, are all of spectacular display through the fast moving, albeit sometimes a little confusing, narrative.
While Bane is a successfully threatening villain his political motivations for bringing Gotham to its knees are somewhat pedestrian. He's on a vendetta against the city's rich, those who have the power to corrupt and continue to do so, and he apparently wants the general populace to fight back and take what is rightfully theirs. This is all well and good, but one wonders why Bane, a mercenary who escaped from a prison known as 'Hell on Earth', would be so interested in such social and political agendas. Then it's revealed that Bane's actually not interested in this at all, but rather, works for the real interested party, Miranda Tate. She is actually Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra's al Ghul, the previous leader of the League of Shadows before Batman killed him, hoping to fulfil her father's work. This is an unexpected twist, and it gives more strength to the central motivations of the antagonists (and to the narrative link within the trilogy as a whole as well). But ultimately it reveals Bane as a hired gun, with confused motivation, and even less backstory. After the film builds him into a mythical creature, they literally disregard his character completely by the end, and his off-handed demise at the hands of Catwoman evidently proves this.
Furthermore, as the film is one of epic proportions, the lives of 12 million Gotham residents are at stake, certain viewers may find it difficult to sustain their suspension of disbelief throughout the film. Bane and a small group of mercenaries are easily able to trick and incapacitate the entirety of Gotham's police force by cleverly placing bombs around the city, and many of the lower and middle class citizens are shown to be relishing in the new, supposedly equal, Gotham Bane had created, despite the fact the city it in a pure state of anarchy. As usual, Batman himself is culpable of many unrealistic feats, including escaping from a secluded prison on a dessert continent, and somehow managing to return to Gotham in America, despite the fact Bane had made this city impenetrable by outside forced by removing all the bridges. Although all this is done to heighten the tension in the film, which it does do quite well, the stakes that are set up are let down in the film, because in the end no significant deaths occur, and predictably, everyone gets a happy ending.
The Dark Knight Rises fittingly concludes Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, and while there might be some plot holes in terms character and believability, the film contains solid acting, stunning action sequences and is able to maintain an epic fast paced narrative for viewers to enjoy.
Rating: 3.5/5
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