DVD Of The Week: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Picture, if you can, an eighty-year-old man who has never seen Star Wars doing an impression of Darth Vader and you have an idea of the voice that has been attached to Bane, the central villain of The Dark Knight Rises.

Bane is a major player in the comic book Batman mythos, and this movie does a decent job of paying homage to that mythology, but I can only speculate that Bane's ridiculous voice was some childish snip by the filmmakers after the many complaints that the original, gravely voice was virtually unintelligible.

Couple this with the fact that although Bane's face is half-covered by a mask, so we never see his lips move, the sound quality is also markedly different when he speaks so it sounds as though Bane is talking from somewhere else (a recording booth?) and you have a bit of a problem at the heart of your movie, before the plot even comes into play.

Which is a shame because Bane is quite key to all the poodoo going down in Gotham City and is supposed to strike a quite menacing figure - but even more than the asthmatic General Grievous (who has a very similar tone) his presence is undermined by a voice that doesn't go with his hulking physique.

The final part of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, like the previous two episodes, is a good movie but not a great movie.

However, despite its bladder-taxing two-and-three-quarter hour duration (which was one of the main reasons I didn't bother with this at the cinema) it keeps the action moving, is never dull and keeps its audience on their toes - so they don't have to time to question the plot too closely.

Using elements from a couple of major arcs in the comics - Knightfall (where Bane 'breaks' Batman) and No Man's Land (where Gotham is cut off from the mainland and taken over by gangs) - The Dark Knight Rises takes place eight years after The Dark Knight.

The Batman has hung up his cape, after the death of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a recluse, with his company heading towards bankruptcy (no, I wasn't convinced by this either - the death of his parents drove him to become a masked crimefighter, but the death of his girlfriend puts him in a self-indulgent tailspin for almost a decade).

However the arrival of cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), masked mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) and a strong-willed young cop, John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in his life stir longings to don the old costume again.

Much to his butler Alfred's (Michael Caine) chagrin - who quits. Yes, Alfred is hardly in this movie.

In fact, Batman, himself, doesn't appear for nearly 40 minutes - but when he does there is a genuine frisson of excitement, but then he's not in action for too long before Bane beats the snot out of him and take him out of the picture again.

There's a lot of hijinks along the way, but basically Bane is after a mothballed Wayne Enterprise's fusion reactor, which he knows how to weaponise, and then uses to hold Gotham hostage... for three months!

This is where the story gets very iffy. It's never really clear why he holds Gotham hostage for three months. He makes no demands and if, as is strongly suggested towards the end, his only goal was to destroy the city then why did he wait so long?  It's one of those great film plots that you don't think about during the movie, but afterwards you find yourself going: "Hey, wait a minute..."

Let's also overlook, the speed with which Batman's broken back recovers in some bizarre, Medieval, subterranean prison in an unnamed Middle Eastern country or how Blake guesses Bruce Wayne's secret and Bruce does nothing to dissuade him before confirming: yes, he is Batman.

That said, there are twists and turns along the way, although no real big surprises, and some great action set pieces. Several  of these do occur in broad daylight, when the Bat-suit and cape don't look their best though.

I was pleasantly surprised by Anne Hathaway's take on Catwoman. While not one of my favourites interpretations of the character, Selina was certainly one tough cookie and actually one of the stand-out characters.

Storywise, The Dark Knight Rises is very flawed and Bane's silly voice certainly doesn't help (thankfully Batman's OTT growl has been reined in since The Dark Knight), but it seems like a fitting end to Nolan's version of The Batman.

To be honest, he lost a lot of my fanboy love way back in Batman Begins when he replaced the sleek Batmobile of the comics (and earlier movies) with that ugly Tumbler monstrosity.

I kind of knew from then on that this wasn't going to be my Batman. It's always felt rather like a TV take on superheroes - with its "realistic" iterations of classic Batman foes - and despite the obvious big budget, and epic sweep of this final flick, I've thought this cycle was missing something.

What it is missing - and is very evident from The Dark Rises (in that Gotham can survive eight years without The Batman) - is the character of the city. Gotham should be a character, with a look and a feel of its own, but Nolan has made it look just like any other major city.

Batman may have had some fancy gadgets in these movies, but he never felt grounded in Gotham. When the franchise gets its inevitable reboot, I hope whoever takes over remembers Gotham is as much part of Batman as he is of Gotham.

And don't give major villains comical voices...