The Dark Knight Rises
Christian Bale's tormented Batman duly rises for Christopher Nolan's bruising saga of revolution and redemption
Old superheroes never die; they simply hang up their capes and retreat to the shadows, awaiting the moment when fashions change and they're required again. One minute Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is hobbling around his country pile, leaning on his stick like a latterday Howard Hughes and woefully proclaiming that "there's nothing out there for me". The next he's back in the bat-suit, back in the saddle – recalled to save the world or Warner Bros, whatever comes first.
Preamble complete, the dark knight duly rises for the bruising final stanza in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a satisfying saga of revolution and redemption that ends the tale on a note of thunder. If viewers were wanting a corrective to the jumpsuit antics of The Avengers, or the noodling high-school angst of The Amazing Spider-Man, then rest assured that Batman delivers in spades. Here is a film of granite, monolithic intensity; a superhero romp so serious that it borders on the comical, like a children's fancy-dress party scripted by Victor Hugo and scored by Wagner.
Still, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Gotham City is facing nuclear catastrophe, with the authorities powerless in the face of a hydra-headed terrorist threat. No sooner has Wayne affixed his bat-ears than he's being bamboozled by a mercurial cat-burglar (Anne Hathaway) and savaged by Bane (Tom Hardy); a fanatical warlord who comes disguised, rather alarmingly, as a monstrous rough-trade gimp. Poor Batman. Bane not only out-punches our hero, he out-rasps him too – delivering his lines in a choked, muddy drawl that makes him sound like Marlon Brando, down a well-shaft, gargling from a jerry-can. Bane might be fomenting a mass uprising against Gotham's moneyed elite; he might be singing the show-tunes from La Cage aux Folles. It is sometimes hard to tell.
guardian.co.uk
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