The Dark Knight Rises

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

The Dark Knight Rises  (C).  I think I may be just about over the whole superhero thing.  I remember liking the two previous Batman movies well enough, but for some reason it felt like a chore to drag myself to this two-hour-and-forty-five-minute spectacle.  I finally got around to it yesterday, and, as my grade reflects, I wasn’t blown away.  When the movie begins, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, American Hustle) has been in virtual seclusion for eight years, and Gotham City has enjoyed a long period of respite from supervillainy.  That vacation from reality ends when the city is conquered and sealed off from the outside world by a muscle-bound freak named Bane (Tom Hardy, Inception) and his band of thugs.  Secondary villain Catwoman (Anne Hathaway, Get Smart) is much less destructive but much nicer to look at.  For me, the whole thing was too much.  Subplots involving congressmen and control of Wayne Enterprises were too complicated for me to want to try to follow.  The film drags for a while after Bane conquers the city and seems to defeat Batman, and we get umpteen different versions of a particular bit of backstory that I could not have cared less about.  Some parts were quite unbelievable, even for a comic-book movie.   I hope they let Batman enjoy a lengthy retirement before the next reboot, but I’m not counting on it . . . .