Saw this Saturday morning in IMax. My $0.02 review is that it was more fun and faster-paced than either BB or TDK, but not nearly as cohesive or provocative as TDK or as fresh as BB. In terms of sheer entertainment value, it's a perfectly enjoyable 2.5 hour action movie, and a worthy end to a great trilogy. But a great movie, it was not.
I had a few issues with the film. First and foremost, I found the plot and accompanying screenplay to be incredibly bloated. There were far too many middling, secondary characters with too much screentime and too little impact on the direction of the plot (e.g., Matthew Modine's character, John Daggett, even John Blake). I also found the editing, particularly in the 1st and 2nd acts, to be rather sloppy and haphazard; it felt like Nolan was trying to provide exposition on so many sub-topics and themes from BB and TDK that he ended up lots and lots of short scenes with clunky dialogue all bound up into a 166-minute mess. Particularly coming off TDK and Inception--the latter of which is among the most precise films I've ever seen, certainly for an action/suspense film--I was a little surprised by how wobbly and uneven I found all the various story threads in the film.
Second, I loved Bane, I loved what Tom Hardy did with the voice, and I honestly don't believe any other director could've translated Bane from the comics to the big screen as effectively and non-campy as Nolan did. That said, I was disappointed in Bane's "plan" and overall arc as a villian. At the end of the day he was basically a mercenary terrorist with a plot to hold Gotham hostage with a nuclear bomb. Supervillian-in-possession-of-hugeass-bomb is a pretty tired formula and it surprised me to see Nolan and Goyer fall back on such a hackneyed premise. (I mean come on, the bomb even had a timer ticking down on the side of it. Seriously?) The reveal with Talia was well-timed, but could've been executed more powerfully; I wish the film had explored Bane and Talia's relationship more and given us a better insight as to Bane's motivations and intentions. As it was, he was basically shown as a huge badass who took people hostage, talked a lot, wore brown/khaki/earthtones at all times, fights like a drunken boxer on roids, and apparently only does whatever Talia wants/tells him to do. Meh. True, it's completely unfair to compare Bane to Ledger's Joker, but I thought Nolan could've done more with the character.
I have some smaller knits too. Thought Hans Zimmer's score was overwrought and heavy-handed, going to the "percussion mixed with unintelligible chanting" well one time too many. I also found the sound mix to be very uneven, with the music drowning out and obscuring lots of the dialogue, particularly in the action scenes. And there was some pretty blatant continuity errors and abuses of any notion of suspension of disbelief. (E.g., if there was a magical knee brace to cure Wayne's bum knee, why wait 8 years to put it on? Or, so all it takes to recover from a broken back is a few dozen push-ups? And are we really to believe that those 3,000 police officers were held hostage in the sewers for 5 months, or that Bruce Wayne found his way from Mexico to Gotham in about a day despite the fact that the city had apparently been held hostage for nigh half a year?) And yes, Bane died far too abruptly. You can't spend 2.5 hours building up a villain like that and then eliminate in a split-second with a gunshot from a secondary character. Weak all the way around.
The movie did some things incredibly well. I thought Hathaway completely nailed Selina Kyle and somehow made the role of "Catwoman" not utterly ridiculous or specious on screen, quite a feat given Nolan's universe. The first fight between Bane and Batman was probably the single most compelling combat scene in the trilogy; it was paced and set up tremendously, and I loved the total absence of musical cues. Just made it feel that much more ruthless and frightening given what we see Bane do to Batman. That's another thing; Nolan has clearly improved in his own technique filming fight scenes, which were woefully inadequate in BB. (Then again, I've read that the editing and cutting of the fight scenes in BB was partly due to Bale not having sufficient time to undergo combat training before filming.)
Overall, a solid if uneven action movie, and good end to a great trilogy. TDK it was not, but TDKR did enough things well to make it worth praising and rewatching.
