Batman finale one part epic conclusion to a game-changer and one part impossible standard to reach. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

The wait is finally over. Will director Christopher Nolan kill The Batman? Will his vision of the Caped Crusader series depart with a definitive ending or dangle the possibility of a fourth installment before us? And now, tragically, will anyone ever refer to the film as anything other than the one where 12 people got shot by a crazy guy who thought he was in a movie? An opening $160 million says the latter may pass, and The Dark Knight Rises remains the most eagerly anticipated movie of the summer. Where is Nolan - the filmmaker that has been an incredible influence on the nature of the superhero film over the last decade - going with the story, and will it be the payoff fans so desperately want?

If you haven't already heard, eight years after he took the fall for corruption-busting DA Harvey Dent's crimes, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has retired Batman and is living like a recluse on the verge of bankruptcy. Into the picture strolls mysterious anarchist Bane (Tom Hardy, with a ridiculous, often incomprehensible voice) who wants to level the societal playing field and "give" Gotham back to its rightful owners: The People. The usual cadre is on hand to help Bruce/Batman regain his lost confidence and faith - Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Alfred (Michael Caine), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) - as well as one of the two women in Gotham, Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and beat cop Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

The short version is that The Dark Knight Rises is good entertainment, but one in which Nolan and Co. are unable to match the elements that made The Dark Knight so strong. As the epic conclusion of a trilogy, it's mostly satisfying, though it leaves you with the feeling that you didn't get quite what you came for - but you're not quite sure what it was you were expecting. One thing that is glaringly obvious is the fact that a super-hero movie is only as strong as its villain, and in Heath Ledger's Joker, they had a superb one. The baddie this time around is a masked thug called Bane, and he isn't nearly as compelling. He's so bad he's alienating and distancing rather than enigmatic and truly terrifying, which does little to keep viewers invested in stopping his dastardly plans. But he's just part of a bloated machine that moves at lightening speed and dumps a pile of information on you at every turn, but takes forever to get where it's going. Thankfully Oldman and Gordon-Levitt are on hand to inject some earthy appeal into the proceedings, and Hathaway doesn't embarrass herself.

Nolan's aspirations to intellectualism, though, are the film's biggest misstep; its Tale of Two Cities influence is thick. The first two in the series had intimate stories that spoke to the bigger picture - stories about the nature of right, wrong, justice and the execution of it among a few other things. Rises wields its messaging about social ills, inequality and power imbalance like a sledgehammer. Timeliness is good in films, and Nolan and brother Jonathan have the 2008 banking meltdown to run with this time. But in trying so hard to make a statement that could be debated as intensely as The Dark Knight's was, Nolan lets his material get away from him (evidenced in a sneaky bait-and-switch that erases most of the early action's significance), and forgets that The Dark Knight Rises is as much about cool gadgets and the man behind the mask as it is about man behind the camera.

The Dark Knight Rises is now showing.

(HK Edition 07/28/2012 page4)