Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises (4 of 5)

This isn’t going to be a detailed review.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises alone because neither my wife nor daughters wished to see it, even though my girls love Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  They weren’t excited by the trailers and after the Colorado shooting, weren’t even willing to see it just for dear old Dad.

It’s a very good movie.  Not as good as The Avengers, I’d rank it about the same as The Amazing Spider-man except that I’m more interested in seeing Spidey a second time in the theater.  I not sure exactly why, except that I had lower expectations for Spider-man and he exceeded them while I had high expectations for TDKR and he didn’t quite meet them.

Now I loved The Dark Knight.  I saw it a couple of times in the theater including once in IMAX.  But TDKR has no one to match Heath Ledger’s Joker.  I also think there were too many characters in TDKR and we didn’t get to spend enough time with them.  If you read my review of The Amazing Spider-man, I explained how less is more.  Few characters means we get a better feel for them.

In The Dark Knight Rises, we have:  Bruce/Batman, Alfred, Gordon, Selena/Catwoman, Bane, Fox, Blake, Miranda, Foley, Daggat, Stryver and the two guys in the pit.  Each of these characters had significant dialogue and multiple scenes.  They could have dropped Foley, comgined Daggat and Stryver into a single character and combined the two guys in the pit into a single character without changing the plot one bit.

There were also several scenes that pulled me out of the movie which is never a good thing.

So I do recommend it, but not as highly as I would have liked.