The Dark Knight Doesn’t Rise To The Occasion

What else can I say? Casual moviegoers and comic book fans alike have committed one of the greatest disservices that can be done to any film series: we have overestimated it. We came in expecting an epic that was just as good if not better than “The Dark Knight”. But we missed an important fact: threequels are rarely any good and filled with flaws not present in previous installations.

And the dialogue was a particular failure. Every other sentence was a one-liner. Not cheesy one-liners that you’d expect in, say, Expendables 2, dramatic one-liners that would finish a speech in the 3^rd act. There’s a reason dramatic one-liners go at the end of dialogue. It’s to add power to what’s being said. If you do it too much, it gets tiresome, annoying and worst of all repetitive

Speaking of repetition, I get the distinct feeling I’ve seen this movie before. Oh, yes, it’s called Batman Begins. Bruce Wayne has been a broken, sad protagonist on-screen before in a whole other 3 hour movie. I hope viewers like Batman Begins, because it’s the second act of this movie.

TDKR seems to have left something behind from TDK. Where’s the sweeping commentary on human nature that, while not groundbreaking, was certainly well executed in TDK? The first film was about conquering one’s fear, the second one was about the evil that lies in the hearts of men. The final one was about something. I’m sure there’s some sort of message about not giving up in there somewhere.

This is the last bold entry into arguably the most critically acclaimed comic book movie series ever. Prepare to sigh. It’s got all the classic bad-ending traits: it’s predictable, it’s jumbled, and it’s just plain ugly. Quite the payoff for being a fan for nigh on a decade.

I ask viewers to contemplate the ramifications of this entire series. Think of what Begins set up, think of what TDK showed us, and then think about whatever happened here. I wouldn’t really say it’s a bad movie, but The Dark Knight Rises falls flat.