[7]

Christopher Nolan wraps up his Batman reboot trilogy by pitting the vigilante superhero against the villain Bane and introducing Catwoman into the mix. Coming in with low expectations (how could they top the last one?), I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie. The first half is rather cumbersome to get through, but never boring. The last half ratchets up both in action and emotion, and by the end, the film had firmly won me over. I especially loved the scenes between Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Alfred (Michael Caine) this time around, and I was pleased to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get so much screen time as an up-and-coming cop. Tom Hardy struggles to perform through Bane’s enormous breathing apparatus, and Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman doesn’t quite leave an indelible mark on my memory, but overall the cast was pretty good.

What seals the deal for me is its unexpected emotional appeal and and a few narrative surprises. I won’t call them twists, because twists are gimmicks — this film works more organically than that. There’s been some hoopla about the film being liberal propaganda, and honestly, that’s a fair argument. The film easily works as allegory, but I didn’t think Nolan and company ever got too pointed or preachy.