The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is a curiosity in that it appears what you get when it seems like the creative team had no one on oversight and they were just brimming with so much self confidence from their last foray to the point that it feels like they did one screenplay draft and called it day. The writing is very sloppy all over the place not only in terms of plot holes, which are the kind you do notice while watching for the first time, and just some particularly strange dialogue. The opening sequence alone is kind of how marvelous in how really ridiculous the whole thing is set up and written, to the point I must admit I get enjoyment out of just watching the absurdity of some of it. A film can have a few of these things, but this one is just brimming from ear to ear with them. John Blake figuring out Batman's identity, Gordon instantly losing his confession, the line " would somebody get this hothead out of here", the central idea behind Catwoman's motivation (so she just took Dagget's word for it?), Bruce Wayne's instant arrival back in Gotham, the list goes on. Nolan's direction though still is on point as there are still some outstanding visual sequences. The film even works emotionally much of the time even if it is overwrought in more than a few ways. The film's bloated in its attempt to top the Dark Knight's stakes, really an impossible task so they just went for an extreme. There are too many plot lines for its own good, to the point that there is a character in John Blake who could have been removed and nothing would have been lost, the same really goes for the film's last minute villain since it seems everyone felt Bane was good enough for a solo act. It takes someone as talented as Nolan to make a film like this because as an underwhelming sequel it's like none other. It does not falter in the ways you'd expect but in entirely different ways that often seem bizarre. The film I'm forced to describe not as bad because there are genuinely good elements, but even in the less successful elements still manage to be interesting in their own way.
3/5