Sigh.
I'm sure it would strike me as a good film if I felt I was keeping up with what was happening. But, for most of the time, I feel like I'm just getting the gist of things and resignedly going along with it. Nodding along to a complex discussion in another language where I have only high school conversational abilities, latching on to words I recognise and extrapolating the meaning of the sentences around them. Important exposition must be somewhere on the cutting room floor, because events dash along in a disjointed fashion and I have to compose connecting material myself to make sense of the story as best I can in my own head. The characters have been tossed haphazardly in to the story and are scrambling toward the conclusion.
Added to that, after such an expressive foil in the Joker, I have trouble Bane. The mask prevents expression, the speech is muffled (which surely could have been cleaned up in the making of the film?) and he wound up seeming purely like a life size action figure to me. And that's ludicrous. A life size action figure. So he's just not terribly menacing.
I really really want to like this film. And I keep thinking "Maybe I just need to watch it one more time..." But it's so hellbent on cramming in the necessary story elements that the story actually winds up suffering for me.
Reflecting on it, I'm surprised to be complaining about that, because I hate films that blatantly, insultingly, spell out all the necessary plot points and give the audience no credit for their intelligence. So that contributes to my trouble with this film, because I keep thinking that perhaps there's something I'M missing, that will make the whole thing magically come together. Reassuringly though, I'm told that I'm not the only one with this reaction to it.
Final Thought: Oh how I wish that Anne Hathaway had more opportunity to play with the Catwoman character...
Up Next: Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2005)
