Missed Opportunities

So I finally saw The Dark Knight Rises— two or three weeks later than most of you, I’m sure— and I was inspired, both by this movie and Spider-Man 3,  to create the following rule:

“Directors, if you’re helming the third installment of a superhero franchise, for God’s sake don’t let your brother write the screenplay!“

The plot barely existed, there were just ideas that got thrown up on the screen, and some of them sort of stuck, and some of them didn’t.  (Bruce Wayne is so paranoid that he bugs his mother’s jewelry, just on the off chance that someone steals it.  I mean, wha?  There aren’t other things he might want to put GPS on first, like f’rinstance a whole parking garage full of heavily armored vehicles?)

Bane, it has to be said, just wasn’t an interesting villain.  The Bane of the comics and video games is more of an antihero: he’s a horribly abused victim who was raised in a prison and subjected to medical experiments, and even when he’s running amok you kind of feel sorry for the guy.  (In that, he’s very like the Hulk.)  This guy was just a thug.  And he was a prosy thug: he just talked on and on in a distorted voice, so that you couldn’t understand what he was actually saying.  (I deeply wanted the movie to have subtitles.)

Note to the director: if you’re going to have a character rattle on in a character-revealing way, don’t put a facemask on him that obscures both his voice and his facial expressions.  If you don’t do these things, the audience might just recognize the character’s humanity.  Might just.

And if you insist on the mask, at least get an actor who can act with his eyes.

The revolt of the People against the Evil One Percent seemed ill-conceived and ill-motivated.  The problem was, you never saw the evil billionaires oppress the poor.  The only billionaire you actually got to know is the one who bankrupted himself trying to bring free energy to the world.

You never saw Simon Legree stealing the rent money from widows and orphans.  In fact Gotham was vastly improved from the previous movies, with crime way down, and what seemed to be a prosperous economy.  So such eagerness to establish the People’s Republic of Gotham seemed sort of arbitrary.  Where’s all that class resentment come from?

(Please understand, I have loads of class resentment.  I’ve been screwed over by whole legions of privileged people who did it just because they could.  And if I were as evil as they, I would have killed them.  But we don’t see that in the movie.  What we see is one billionaire being benign, and another trying to screw him over, and though that isn’t nice, from a class perspective it doesn’t much matter.)

In a big plot twist, one of the characters turns out to be Talia, the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul.  Which is fine, except that the character would have been a lot more interesting if she’d been Talia all along.  Talia, with her twin ambitions of sleeping with Batman and eliminating four-fifths of the world’s population in order to save the planet, is a much more interesting character.  She’s another great antihero.  Instead, in the film, she and the League of Assassins Shadows want to wipe out Gotham because, I dunno, it’s evil or something.

The film stayed true to its comic-book origins in having lots of illogical fights.  Only haymaker punches were used, along with a few front kicks.  (And when the police counterattacked, they made a human wave assault against cannon and machine guns.  Which has been out of fashion since, at least, 1917.)

At no point did I have any idea that anyone in this film knew how to fight.  At no point did Batman try to use tactical intelligence against Bane.  Bane beat him down in the first fight because Batman was stupid.  Batman beat Bane down in their second confrontation not because he got smarter, but because, well, he just did.

And really, Bruce Wayne’s been a hermit too long.  He gets all stupid when women are in the room.  He’s betrayed by Selina, and then he’s betrayed by Talia, and you’d think someone paranoid enough to bug his mom’s jewelry would be at least a little suspicious of both of them.

And speaking of Selina, Catwoman’s portrayal is yet another flat portrait of what could have been a terrific antihero role.   I liked Anne Hathaway in the part, but really, none of her motivation made any sense.  She lives in the criminal underworld, but she doesn’t know how to get false ID?  The only thing that will work for her is to somehow sanitize the ID she was born with?  I mean, WTF?  I’m not a criminal, and I know how to get false ID.

The best role in the movie is played by Michael Caine, but even his character makes no sense— he gets a hissy fit halfway through the film and disappears.  Yeah thanks, loyal servant.

And then there’s an unearned happy ending.  Bruce Wayne is rewarded for being a stupid tool for two and a half hours.  The new Robin finds the Batcave, but how’s he going to support the vigilante lifestyle without the billions that go with it?

So really, if the film had followed up on any of the potentially interesting characters, it could have been awesome.

As it is, it’s sort of a cold pizza with way too many ingredients.