This week the heat team grabbed their popcorn and Minstrels and headed to the pictures to watch the three biggest releases in Moviesville over the past seven days - The Dark Knight Rises; starring Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway, Lola Versus; starring Greta Gerwig and The Brooklyn Brothers Beat The Best; starring Ryan O'Nan.
Here's what we thought:
The Dark Knight Rises
STARRING: Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan (CERT 12A, 164 minutes)
The plot: For his final, trilogy-ending Batman picture, director Christopher Nolan pushes events eight years beyond The Dark Knight. Thanks to a major empowerment of law enforcement, organised crime is in abeyance, and both Bruce Wayne (Bale) and his caped alter ego have retired from public life. But when the psychotic Bane (Hardy) unleashes war on Gotham, Batman returns to the fray. Along the way he tangles with cat burglar Selina Kyle (Hathaway), romances Wayne Industries board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) and inspires plucky cop John Blake (Gordon-Levitt), who grew up in an orphanage funded by Wayne’s charitable foundation.
What’s right with it? The movie starts with a bang via a spectacular aerial segment establishing Bane as a highly resourceful foe, and later hits warp speed again after he takes control of Gotham, blowing up its bridges, blocking its tunnels, and unleashing underclass resentment against the city’s pampered elites. It’s astonishing to see this cautionary tale about the perils of widening inequality unfold within a mega-budget blockbuster.
What’s wrong with it? After the whiz-bang curtain-raiser, the first hour seems unnecessarily complicated, talky and weighed down by the burden of respecting the trilogy’s overall story arc.
Verdict: Hot on the heels of the mind-spinning Inception, Nolan once again proves himself as the writer-director most capable of taking the Hollywood blockbuster into surprising and audacious directions. You’d be crazy to miss it. 4/5 @charlesgant
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