No one could hope that Rises could ever be as good as The Dark Knight, which is inarguably the best superhero movie ever made. The main problem with Rises is that director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan forced the Rises screenplay to tie up the plot threads of The Dark Knight and Batman Begins into a perfect and bleak bow.
This creates too many contrived revelatory moments, particularly during the film’s third act. However, I honestly didn’t care that I was suffering too many plot twists because I was watching, after all, a comic book movie.
I didn’t care that Anne Hathaway wasn’t as good a Catwoman as Michelle Pfeiffer was in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, because Hathaway was sly, slinky and funny. I was only bothered a little that Tom Hardy’s voice was occasionally muffled by the villain Bane’s mask because, when he could be heard, his speeches were so lyrical and so cynical they gave me chills.
I was so excited by the last hour of the film that for an hour afterward, my heart was still racing.
