Gone, gone, o form of man and rise the demon Batty Man

The Dark Knight Rises is a curious beast. It's the closing part of a trilogy, yet it ignores most of the middle film to revisit the main elements of the plot from Batman Begins and tries to do so using a modern villain unknown to most viewers schooled by Adam West and Burton et al (as I'm sure Schumacher's contribution to the franchise has been blotted from their minds). 

As such, it fails on several levels - if it's using Bane, it feels it has to shoehorn in THAT scene from Batman #497 which it does very successfully. But then the aftermath - having already set up the decay clock being triggered at 5 months - has to be rushed and can't work successfully within the narrative. It's one thing having a supernatural healer in the comics, but Tom Conti punching vertebrae back into place is a step too far. If you're going to make a more realistic Bat universe you have to deal with the fallout of that, which is that you have to adopt more human response times - you show us the frail(ish) Bruce Wayne at the beginning of the film, he sees the doctor who tells him what's physically wrong with him and PRESTO CHANGO it's all forgotten. We see Bruce with a knee brace on at one point (presumably to explain it) which then isn't visibly part of his costume and can't fit under it. 

Bane, as a character, has so many wrongs done to him here it's incredible. I'm more than happy with the reification of his mask being strong painkillers (although how that makes him strong, rather than wanting to eat tortilla chips all day doesn't stand up to too much scrutiny), but his whole part coming down to SOB SOB I WUB YOU TALIA in the end is straight up bullshit. Her presence was one of the things I had spoiled for me before I saw it, but knowing it made it all the more obvious how battered over the head you are by it as the film continues - her presence in certain scenes, the relevance of the energy cell, the strange use of language by Tom Conti and Old Blind Doctor Guy completely stand out as LOOK AT ME I'M A PLOT HINT. 

Despite all this, I enjoyed the end result quite a bit. The underground lair is kind of really well done and even the silliness of the football field is quite easily forgotten. The Bats/Cats interplay is great and Tom Hardy lends an air of camp that lightens the tone considerably. There's yet more to hate I haven't mentioned - Michael Caine's scene in the Lord Of The Rings ending springing immediately to mind - and it could undoubtedly be tighter throughout. JGL's character is an unneccesary luxury, Anne Hathaway is under-used (and seems in many ways to be proving only obscure points of Bat-continuity) and the insistence that the NYPD are better than Delta Force is ridiculous flag-waving; although I did love that one of them was still fat after 5 months underground on bread and water. Whose rations was he eating? Why did nobody else notice when he was stuffing his face with the only food supply they had? Is JGL secretly a feeder and that was his Bear? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.