The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

There’s a Storm Coming, Mr. Wayne.

I went into each of the new Batman movies with some degree of trepidation.  The first movie suffered from the reputation left by the previous movie, and the second movie suffered from the high standard set by one of the actors in the Tim Burton version.  Going into the third Batman by Christopher Nolan, I did my very best to keep my expectations low, but I could feel myself losing that fight the second a plan was made to see it.  That’s when it was becoming real.  But I still had the nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that there was no possible way this movie could be better than the Dark Knight.  The Dark Knight may be my favorite comic book movie ever, tied with Avengers and Watchmen.  If this movie trounced its predecessor, then I would need to write a review naming a new movie as my undisputed favorite comic book movie of all time.  Am I about to do that?  Let’s find out in my review of The Dark Knight Rises, written by Jonathan Nolan, co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Josh Pence, Juno Temple, Nestor Carbonell, Matthew Modine, Alon Abutbul, and Cillian Murphy.

Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham City has reached a relative state of peace due to the Dent Act and the efforts of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman).  So peaceful has Gotham become that the savior of Gotham, the vigilante known as Batman (Christian Bale) has disappeared into seclusion that he breaks only to have conversations with his butler Alfred (Michael Caine), and to get robbed by a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway).  But Selina stole more than Bruce Wayne’s mother’s necklace; she also stole his fingerprints … and a congressional representative.  She sells the prints to a criminal named Bane (Tom Hardy) who uses them to bankrupt Bruce Wayne.  While investigating the sewers, Commissioner Gordon also gets shot by Bane’s men, but is rescued by a cop named Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), but a speech Gordon had in his jacket falls into Bane’s hands, revealing to him the truth about the cover-up of Harvey Dent’s crimes.  Gotham City needs Batman again, but does he have it in him to defeat this new foe and stop his terrorist plot?

This time I was right.  The Dark Knight Rises was not able to come close to the legacy left by The Dark Knight.  I’m in no way trying to say that this movie was bad, but it had a whole lot to live up to and it wasn’t able to.  That being said, Dark Knight Rises was a really good movie, and really strong in a lot of ways, but my three favorite comic book movies are resting comfortably on their thrones.  I think the story was what got on my nerves a little bit.  Though it was good, there were just too many things that just didn’t make sense to me.  Take, for instance, when Selina Kyle steals Bruce Wayne’s car early on in the movie.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but Bruce Wayne is the most famous person in Gotham, yet the valet doesn’t realize that he’s not married and that he left his really expensive vehicle by himself, so he just gives the keys to any lady holding a ticket claiming to be his wife?  So that dude’s fired.  There were plenty of things that I loved though.  One such occasion was when Selina Kyle disappeared when Batman turned around and he said, “So that’s what that feels like.”  Without spoiling it, I was also very happy to see that they used the most famous thing from the comic book storyline of Bane in this movie.  I don’t know the Batman universe that well, but the one thing I knew that Bane did happened, and I loved it.  There’s also a great deal of emotion in this movie, and I don’t think they’ve really done that successfully in the previous movies.  But I really liked the last thing Batman says to Commissioner Gordon in the movie, and a few of the things Alfred said to Bruce during the last half of the movie almost brought me to tears.  I will say that I did not like the ending of the movie, but I’ll go into more detail in the next paragraph.

I know that doesn’t sound like I had that many complaints about the story of the movie, but the reason I left some out was that they contain spoilers.  The first non-spoiler I would give you is about spoilers, but I would recommend you not check IMDb before watching this movie.  Just looking at the credits for this movie spoiled something that could have potentially been a huge surprise near the end of the movie.  Maybe two things, depending on how asinine and descriptive the posters get with the character names.  But here’s the rest of them ::SPOILER ALERT::  The huge thing it spoiled for me was that Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, was in the movie.  That’s not revealed until the last 15 minutes of the movie!  But, when I went in knowing she was in the movie, it was pretty easy to figure out who she was and who the trigger person was going to be.  One of the big problems I had was with Batman in the prison.  He tried to escape the prison around three times before he realized that he needed to make the jump without the rope holding him back.  Friendboss Josh realized that when the first person tried to make that jump.  How is he smarter than the World’s Greatest Detective?  I regarded the ending of the movie as a total “fuck you” as well.  Batman dies … or does he?!  No.  The problem with this is that it really didn’t make any sense.  If Batman wanted a vacation, he doesn’t need to fake his death, and certainly not to the people he’s closest to.  He let Alfred, Lucius, Gordon, Blake, and Selina Kyle all think that he was dead for a good long time before they either figured it out on their own or ran into him on vacation with Kyle in Italy.  It did have a bit of an emotional impact on me as a viewer though, but it was mostly anger.  Knowing this was Nolan’s last Batman movie, I had entertained the possibility that he might kill off Batman, but you can’t just do that.  Batman’s almost a century old; you can’t just come in and kill him.  Then, when I saw him in the café at the end, I just wondered why the fuck that little misdirection was necessary.  There were some good spoilers as well.  I thought it was total genius how Bane’s mercenaries used the army against the people of Gotham by making them keep the people of Gotham in town because they would set off the bomb if even one person made it across the bridge.  I also thought it would’ve been an awesome reveal if I didn’t already know it was coming (Fuck you, IMDb!) to find out that Talia was the kid in the prison and Ra’s was the mercenary being talked about in the story.  I got goosebumps when they showed the scene from the first movie that tied into it.  ::END SPOILERS::

I enjoyed all of the performances in this movie, but there certainly wasn’t anything on the level of Heath Ledger.  I know it’s an unfair comparison, but it’s also necessary.  Christian Bale did a great job in the movie.  He wasn’t really the same Bruce Wayne we’d seen before as he was dealing with a lot of emotions in this movie.  In the beginning of the movie, he’s in seclusion and his guilt at the death of Rachel is still wearing on him, and it’s only getting worse with him turning it inward as he doesn’t have the distraction of being Batman anymore.  But that was part of the problems I had with the movie: there was not enough Batman!  He’s not Batman for a large part of the movie, and the first time he becomes Batman he just doesn’t seem that into it anymore.  He’s back in form near the end of the movie, but I was getting bummed out about it by then.  Tom Hardy did a great job in this movie as well, and I’ll avoid the Joker comparison to give him the credit he deserves.  This is the Bane they needed to make in the movie.  One of the biggest problems I had with Bane’s appearance in Batman and Robin was that they seemed only interested in recreating the character’s look.  Yeah, he’s a big brutish looking guy wearing a mask, but he’s not some mindless goon.  Bane had a genius-level intellect in comic books, but that movie makes him unable to string two words together.  This movie does Bane justice.  Tom Hardy makes him completely intelligent and intimidating.  They also had a good reason for him to wear the mask, which I was wondering how they’d pull off when they didn’t want to take the Venom angle from the comic books.  Anne Hathaway also did a pretty good job as Selina Kyle, but I can’t say that I think her role required all that much out of her than being fuckin’ hot.  She did that part of it with gusto, but also gave a pretty good performance.  I probably would’ve preferred that they had a few hundred more scenes of her riding Batman’s motorcycle wearing skintight leather from behind though.  Her character created some questions for me, though.  The main one was how Bruce could still be moping over Maggie Gyllenhaal 8 years after her death when he just met Anne Hathaway.  I’d be over it pretty gundamned quickly.  I also really liked the look of her “Catwoman” costume (though she’s never referred to that way as far as I know).  And not just because it was skintight on Anne Hathaway’s body either.  I liked that it felt really reminiscent of the Catwoman costume from the Adam West days, but they made it better by making it so she wasn’t intentionally wearing cat ears, it just looked like she was when her goggles were pushed back onto her head.  On another note, I understand that Catwoman is very agile and flexible and everything, but was it actually necessary for her to kick the lever on the window washing scaffold at one point in the movie?  It was above her head and you could’ve just pulled it with your hands.  Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

I’m sure it’s hard to tell from the review I just wrote, but I did really like The Dark Knight Rises.  It was a great movie and did not lessen the average quality of the trilogy in the least, but not much can live up to the legacy left by The Dark Knight.  The story was fantastic, but had some problems that hindered its overall quality, but all of the performances were fantastic and made me so happy that someone finally did Bane justice so we can stop using Batman and Robin as a character reference for him.  I had some problems with the movie, but I had absolutely no problem seeing it in theater.  It was totally worth it.  I’m happy I saw it, I’m in love with the trilogy in total, and I can’t wait to buy it on BluRay.  The Dark Knight Rises gets “You made some mistakes, Miss Kyle” out of “The Batman has to come back.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

We Live in a Kingdom Controlled by Fear

Have you ever wanted to see a classic novel like The Three Musketeers designed like Wild Wild West?  Yeah, me neither.  But that didn’t stop them from making one.  In the past, I’ve found myself less than impressed with the work of Paul W.S. Anderson, but I’m usually happy about the fact that his involvement generally brings Milla Jovovich, who I am always happy to watch.  And, what’s more than that, I love a good sword fight.  So I guess what made me have any interest in potentially watching Anderson destroy a story I love was the hotness of Jovovich and the promise of sword fighting.  Let’s see what happened in my review of The Three Musketeers, loosely based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, written by Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and starring Logan Lerman, Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans, Ray Stevenson, Milla Jovovich, Christoph Waltz, Freddie Fox, Orlando Bloom, Juno Temple, Mads Mikkelsen, Gabriella Wilde, James Corden, and Til Schweiger.

For no particular reason, the Three Musketeers – Athos (Matthew MacFadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans) – and Athos’ lady friend, Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich), are trying to steal plans for an airship designed by Leonardo da Vinci.  Having gotten a better offer, de Winter drugs the Musketeers and gives the plans over to the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom).  A year later, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), leaves Gascony for Paris to become a Musketeer.  When he gets to Paris, a series of misunderstandings lead to him having consecutive duels with all three Musketeers, but it’s broken up by the guards of Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), the diabolical priest-y dude that’s trying to take control of France from King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox).  The Musketeers find out that Cardinal Richelieu is trying to take over France with an elaborate plot to make it seem like Louis’ queen, Anne (Juno Temple), had been banging the bejesus out of the Duke of Buckingham.  I don’t know how that will help him take control of France, but you just go along with it.  The Musketeers have to stop the plot, D’Artagnan starts wanting a piece of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Constance (Gabriella Wilde), and that airship comes back into the movie.

This isn’t what I would call a “good movie”, but it was decently fun for all of it’s stupidity.  I think that what I didn’t like about this actually had nothing to do with Paul W.S. Anderson.  It was mainly the story.  Yeah, it’s LOOSELY based on a fantastic novel, but it kind of fucks of what made the novel good.  The novel was a lot of fun, and the movie is as well, but they started to lose me when they brought in the giant airship, which was basically one of the boats from Pirates of the Caribbean with a balloon on the top.  My mind instantly went back to watching Wild Wild West and seeing that big, ridiculous, mechanical spider.  The airship was slightly more plausible than the spider, but still pretty ludicrous.  So ridiculous was it that, when the Musketeers were escaping from their pursuing airship by flying into some storm clouds, I half expected the response to “You’re never going to find them in there” to be them activating the medieval radar, which would essentially be them pulling a lever and dropping a whale out of the bottom of the ship and using it’s echolocation to find the other airship.  It wouldn’t have been that farfetched to me when contrasted with the flying pirate ships.  My remaining complaints on the story require ::SPOILER ALERTS::  First, one of the most memorable things about the Three Musketeers what the fate of Milady de Winter, and this movie pissed on that well and good.  In the novel, it’s a very memorable part when Athos is forced to have de Winter executed for her betrayal, even though he loves her.  It’s a very poignant scene.  They go for it in a sense here, but then put it under the glass coffee table and shit all over it’s chest.  It takes place on the airship and Athos is going to shoot her, but she dives off the airship into the water – easily ten stories above the water – in order to save Athos from the regret of killing her himself.  Naturally we assume, understanding physics as we do, that falling from that height and hitting water would be roughly the same as hitting concrete and de Winter would be pulverized, so I was okay with the way they decided to stick to the book.  At the end of the movie, the Duke of Buckingham fishes her out of the water, alive but a bit confused.  And she walked pretty well for someone whose BONES WOULD BE POWDER!  And that’s not even mentioning the unlikelihood of someone actually being able to locate someone adrift in the ocean.  Athos also was going to kill her because she betrayed France and it was his duty, not something stupid and selfish like his own hatred.  I also didn’t understand the idea of letting the Cardinal get away with his attempted betrayal, but I can’t really shit on it because I don’t remember what happened to him in the book.  ::END SPOILER::

One could argue that Paul W.S. Anderson had at least some control over the script, but since I don’t know his level of involvement, I can’t really blame the story on him.  The parts that I would expect a director to be in control of were actually pretty enjoyable, with a couple of complaints.  The main complaint comes from the answer to this question: what do you think of when you think about the Three Musketeers?  For me (and probably most people) it’s sword fights.  There isn’t an actual sword fight until about a half hour into the movie.  That’s not to say there isn’t action for the first 30 minutes, but they made the characters that I think of as iconic examples of sword fighters into people to whom swords were fairly secondary to pistols or fists.  And, in the case of Porthos, baskets he’s found laying around.  Some solid swordplay comes up later, but it bothered me that they would rather give the Musketeers some fantasy contraptions instead of having them sword fight.  And the action scenes were pretty fun, although they did use slo-mo a little much for my tastes.  I was a bit confused by Athos because he stabbed a guy in the chest and then headbutted him.  Why would you do that?  He’s already dead.  If you wanted to hurt your own head, you could’ve just face-planted after stabbing him.  Another thing that made me dislike the giant airships in this movie was that it was more time where they were doing action without the sword fighting I came to see.  It was just like Pirates of the Caribbean cannon battles in midair.  At one point, de Winter has to steal some jewelry from the Queen, and they tried really hard to fit in the overused classic of red lasers in a hallway that you can only see by blowing some powder down the hall.  To do that, they used thin, nearly invisible razor wire.  It worked well enough.

The performances were very hit and miss in this movie.  The person who could be considered the main character, Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan, did not work for me.  He reminded me of Keanu Reeves in his delivery, and that’s not really a compliment.  His delivery was quasi-surfer dude in a time period that didn’t support that.  I also didn’t like a couple of things they did with his character, like how he would defend his horse’s honor … to the death!  This also happened right before another stupidity on his part.  Moments before, his father warned him that his opponents might not be as honorable as him.  Then, the first thing he does when he gets into a fight is to turn his back on his opponent.  He gets shot for it, but sadly it was only a flesh wound.  Also, when he finally kills Rochefort, he stabs him in the chest with his heirloom sword that his father gave him and then lets him fall off of the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with it still in his chest.  I know that you could go and take it from his corpse on the floor, but you also could have kept your fuckin’ sword by just pulling it out, dumbass.  I thought all three of the main Musketeers did very well, but did nothing particularly standout.  Milla Jovovich did a fine job, but I was mainly looking to see her be hot, so I got that.  Gabriella Wilde as Constance and Juno Temple as the Queen were also very beautiful.  Christoph Waltz did an the job you’d expect from a great actor like him, but you do begin to wonder about his choices in movies now that he’s getting to be a big name in America. Orlando Bloom seemed much more gay than usual in this movie, even though he was trying to be a badass.  Also, James Corden as Planchet, the fat comic relief, was annoying, and in the film far too often.

The Three Musketeers was exactly what I expected it to be.  They took a good story and wiped their asses with it, but had some decent action that was perhaps a bit light on the swordplay for my tastes.  Altogether it was a dumb movie, but fun enough that I don’t regret the dollar I rented it for.  I’d say it’s worth checking out from the RedBox, but you’ll also do alright if you never get around to watching it.  It’s the dumb fun for a night of shutting off your brains, or making fun of it with your friends.  I still like the Kiefer Sutherland/Charlie Sheen/Oliver Platt movie a lot better.  This version of The Three Musketeers get “Are you always this cocky?” out of “Lower the whale!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.