The Dark Knight Rises

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2012
Country of origin:	USA / UK
Director:	Christopher Nolan
Genre:	The Legacy Ends
Starring:	Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1345836/
Tagline:	The Legacy Ends
Favourite line:	"Behold, the instrument of your liberation!"

Nolan and Bale sitting in a tree, K-I-Double-S-I-N-G.

The plot:
Blamed for the death of ‘saviour’ of Gotham City, Harvey Dent, Batman and, by extension, Bruce Wayne, retreat from the glare of publicity.
Living in isolation for eight long years, Wayne believes his days donning the black cape are well and truly behind him.
Then, word reaches him of a new menace to face the city: Bane, a psychopath, rumoured to be the only man to have ever escaped from the worst prison on earth.
But what does Bane want in Gotham city?
How does it tie in with Wayne’s past?
And what, exactly, is a Catwoman, anyway?

The culmination of the Dark Knight trilogy, this is epic in scope, scale and grandeur. Bale we’re used to by now, and take it as red he’ll be very, very good – he always is – and, this time, his voice when in Batman guise has returned to the more plausible levels of Batman Begins.
Anne Hathaway is an actress who hasn’t really troubled the radar of us down here at Smell the Cult HQ, mainly as she tends to be in movies that we try to avoid but, if her performance as Catwoman is anything to go by, she’s certainly got some chops, and more than convinces as the petty thief turned masked night crawler.
New main villain in town is, of course, Bale, played with physical conviction by the ever-morphing Tom Hardy. Here he’s all beefed up, and those inhumanly large shoulder muscles, last seen in Warrior, are back. Wearing the respirator device, his voice is distorted, somewhat, and the accent he has chosen to adopt makes it difficult to tell what he’s actually saying at times, but that only serves to add to the mystique. A proper scary motherfucker, for the first time in a comic book movie you get the genuine sense that here is a villain who cannot be defeated by the hero, and the showdowns between the batty one and Bale are just great.
Clocking in at a punishing two hours forty five minutes, expect to be there for the long haul, but at no point does this drag and the ending, when it comes, is just about perfect.
The best trilogy ever made?
Up for debate, of course, but you’d be hard pressed to find a better one.
Just brilliant.