The only thing I feel during a Christopher Nolan movie these days is my bladder swelling.
The Dark Knight Rises is so clunky and mechanical it feels like a tinker engineered it out of dead hunks of steel: stopped-clock images, mascot characterizations, hospital-form dialogue, Rube Goldberg emotions, lifeless cityscapes, conveyor-belt music, accountant editing, and bumper-sticker politics. The thing moves because every breathing moment is lopped off with a guillotine. This isn’t the techno montage of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but a frenzied hurry-up-and-wait technique—bureaucratic filmmaking at its most punctual. With robotic enthusiasm
The Dark Knight Rises asserts love and fear instead of evoking them, and it takes three tries for its hero to make it to the final act because that’s what they tell you in screenwriting class. Its greatest joke is that the Scarecrow’s psychotropic mask and the Joker’s chaotic menace are succeeded by a dom-bear’s gag ball. The film’s so dead I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a joke or not that higher-ups keep calling Joseph Azrael-Levitt’s Jump-Street do-gooder a hothead: He’s the most calmly insubordinate cop in pulp history. This is a film about villains hurting Bruce Wayne where he lives, and demagogues riding populist outrage into military dictatorship, and an empowered lower class storming the Bastille, and an underground resistance, and a busload of orphans, and two of the sexiest men in Hollywood, and it has all the emotional power of a bank. And they say Nolan doesn’t pick sides.
