@ Jason Switzer:

Agreed, Bane’s back story was absolutely lame. In fact, when it was revealed that he was merely a flunky of Talia it actually took away from his character. I wish he was more like the original Bane… Or at the very least a more interesting character. There was just nothing to him.

Plus I think putting him in a mask for the entire movie was a mistake. The great part about Joker was how Heath Ledger chose to play him. You can barely see like 10% of Tom Hardy’s face behind that contraption. It is really hard to breathe life into a character if he is always behind the mask. It kinda/sorta worked in V, but did not work here at all.

@ Chris Wellons:

Haha, yes – I saw that South Park episode too. I could not help but chuckle whenever Bane would talk. I kept imagining the South Park dads beating up the UPS man. :P

And yeah, the UPS man throwdown had about as good choreography as Dark Knight Rising which is super sad.

@ Jason *StDoodle* Wood:

Yep, it was pretty much first Christopher Nolan movie that I felt was sloppy. Most of his work is done very well. He usually is very detail oriented, and packs a lot of meaning into little things. It seems that he completely checked out for this one.

Funny, my brother and I were just bitching about this movie last weekend. It had so many potentially good ideas, but such poor execution; and a rather rushed one at that; that overall it fell pretty flat. That was our consensus, anyway.

I stopped going to movie theaters a couple of years ago so I also missed this one. Since you posted this (and I wanted to avoid spoilers, so I didn’t read your review until after), and since GitHub has been down all day, today I took the time to watch it. My overall opinion was also that it was meh.

I don’t have much to say about the story. I went in expecting a corny story and that’s what I got. Instead, here’s my input on two technical aspects.

What’s funny is that I too was complaining about the fight choreography — to my wife, who was giving the movie about half her attention. I kept stopping to replay parts with really obvious force kicks and such. I even suggested that it reminded me of Star Trek choreography.

I also think the sound was done very poorly. As you pointed out, Bane’s voiced sounded dubbed over the whole time. Every time he spoke this was so obvious to me that it broke what little immersion remained. (Plus, we already saw the South Park parody episode months ago so we were thinking of Randy as being Bane, making us laugh.) The audio levels were all over the place, even some conversations between two people had one person’s voice much lower than the other’s. Maybe this wasn’t so bad in the theaters and was instead an artifact of poor Blu-ray mastering.

Seems to me the actual Knightfall story arc would have been better played out on scene than some corny dirty bomb plot. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but this movie asked too much; everything from the exceedingly lame Catwoman (I didn’t think it could be worse than Halle Berry) to the pointless ending that completely breaks character (both movie and comics). I understood that Nolan crafted a different Batman after the first movie, but the ending to the third movie was yet another break in character. First, he’s intelligent and motivated by vengeance. Then, he’s a bonehead who’s behind every step of the way (so much that he willingly becomes a villain to spare the image of a perceived hero). Lastly, he becomes old, soft, and broken, only to be magically revived with a sprinkling of non-vengeance motivation.

While I greatly enjoyed the second movie myself, I was frustrated at how Nolan decided to end his vision of the saga. In fact, the best part of the entire saga was Heath Ledger’s portrayal of Joker, which only makes it slightly depressing he wasn’t alive to help with the Knightfall saga (murder of Jason Todd, escape from Arkham, Jean-Paul Valley, etc).

Also, side note, Bane’s comic story (his addiction to Venom and its effect on his body) seems much better to me than some schmuck who was beaten up saving a child. In the comics, Bane is ultimately defeated when Jean-Paul Valley severs the tubes feeding Bane the Venom, causing severe and immediate withdrawal. Valley then beats the pulp out of him and hands him over to the police. Again, much better writing.