At The Movies

 

With David Begelman

Citizen News Film Critic

 

“The Dark Knight Rises:” Batman Sinking

 

A remarkable thing about the last installment of the Batman series, “The Dark Knight Rises” is the near incomprehensibility of its choppy story line. Director Christopher Nolan’s overinflated clunker has you wondering what’s actually going on in the blockbuster. It teems with characters who seem to have widely divergent and not always transparently clear agendas.

Talk about overpopulated casts. There are 267 separate characters in the film, some of whom include movie stars seemingly along for the ride. It’s as if their roles were a last fling before some anticipated demise of the acting profession. They include Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Blake), Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Ann Hathaway (Selina), Marion Cotillard (Miranda), Morgan Freeman (Fox), Michael Caine (Alfred). Matthew Modine (Foley), William Devane (President), Liam Neeson (Ra’s Al Ghul) and Tom Conti (Prisoner). The production team of “The Dark Knight Rises” with 134 specialists in the Art department alone apparently refuses to believe that less is more should ever be a guiding principle.

This film makes you nostalgic for the good old days when Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker brought it off with more charm than Nolan’s humongous vehicle could ever envision. The newest villain is hulking Bane, a bald and muscular monster whose demands on everyone are issued through an apparatus stuck to his face like a metal appendage designed for a house cleaning.  His plans for Gotham City include arranging a thermonuclear catastrophe. Nicholson’s gleeful Joker indulged more modest ambitions, like invading a museum to spray-paint priceless works of art.

Christian Bale’s Batman, unlike Keaton’s, continues his downhill course of mental deterioration. Well on the way to what should probably culminate in being comatose, we find him at the beginning of the film a bearded recluse. He has retired from his war on the forces of evil, presumably because he’s been blamed for the death of Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s former mayor. I’d say that amounts to not only unconstructive moping, but being a sore loser in spades, to boot. While it takes Bruce Wayne some time to shed the doldrums, he finally does so to save humanity or, considering the circumstances, what’s left of it.

Bane has clearly made a mess of things. He’s even brought a football game to a grinding halt—a clear indication of just how much malevolent power the monster wields across the urban American landscape. To add insult to injury, he’s set up a tribunal to sentence his version of social malefactors to death, reviving the tradition of Robespierre during the Reign of Terror in 18^th century France.

With the aid of Ann Hathaway’s sultry Catwoman, Batman rights all wrongs after escaping from a prison deep within the bowels of the earth. Never one to accomplish superheroic feats without at least an occasional setback, he makes three attempts to hoist himself out of captivity before finally succeeding. On two of them, he falls back from a height that would not only seem to compromise him orthopedically, but explain the limp he exhibits for entirely different reasons in other sections of the film. When finally donning Batman attire and ready for bear, our hero does in the bad guys in a voice that sounds like he has terminal laryngitis.

Nearly 90% of critics felt “The Dark Knight Rises” was a fine film, leading one to speculate whether their undercover role as press agents for production companies has been a successful ruse. Isn’t it time we abandoned the faux enthusiasm for trussed up video games masquerading as movies, and begin making films again? Or is fare like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” at this point only a pipe dream?

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