The Dark Knight Rises, and falls, and rises ...

It ends with less razzle dazzle than you’d imagine. Just the lift of a glass and a small nod. “So long, old friend,” it seems to say.

But it does end. Definitively. No wacky credits clip or post-credits sequence the way Marvel movies end. No cute wink at more sequels, more spinoffs, more, more, more. A passing reference is made to Batman’s sidekick, but it didn’t seem genuine, like maybe they were just shuffling him into the discard pile as opposed to prepping his own franchise. The film goes out of its way to tell us, “It’s over. Let him rest.”

That’s the beauty of The Dark Knight Rises and its predecessors: the franchise had a story arc all along, and here it plunges into cold, dark finality, a fitting tribute to a reluctant hero. The whole final conclusion feels sorta like Armageddon with its “wham-bam, thank you Batman” explosives. But the scenes after are subtle, and delicate, a stirring juxtaposition after 170 minutes of mayhem and destructo-rama.

You will see many reviews of The Dark Knight Rises. The contrarians will hate it; and they will make respectable, albeit unpopular, arguments. The fanboys will adore it, blinded by their insatiable appetites, appetites incapable of evaluating a movie’s most obvious shortcomings. This review is somewhere in the middle: I respected the care and complexity in which director Christopher Nolan executes the plot elements of the last chapter of his trilogy, but the film occasionally descends into madness, where logic and visual continuity dare not enter.

We find Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) eight years after his Dark Knight was accused of killing White Knight Harvey Dent, whose villainous final days were erased from his legacy. St. Dent now lives on in the spirits of Gotham, where crime is down and peacetime is declared by police brass. Batman has retired, and Wayne is living as a recluse in Wayne Manor. “I heard he has eight-inch fingernails and he pees in mason jars,” one character says, referring to the later madness of Howard Hughes.

Wayne may have normal-length fingernails — no word on the mason jars — but his body is surely broken: he walks with a cane (two if you count Michael), his knees have no cartilage, his brain has suffered from multiple concussions and his elbows are frail. His X-rays are what you’d expect from Batman’s lifestyle. “No heli-skiing for you, Mr. Wayne,” his doctor tells him.

I tremendously enjoyed these early parts of Rises. We’ve never seen a hero like this before, and Bale captures the tremendous defeat, and the calm rage it’s spawned, that Wayne has endured. For this trilogy to work we had to see Batman at the bottom and here we see it several times, which adds value to his eventual rise.

There may be peace, but a dark scourge swarms Gotham’s sewers. The scourge is lead by Bane, a hulking behemoth with a wheezing respirator — borrowed from a closet marked “Vader, D.” — who wants to upend the civility of Gotham with chaos and tyranny, specifically with the one-percenters and their fancy palaces. He begins his revolution  by walling off the city, blowing up the bridges, blocking the tunnels and trapping the police, who dutifully marched into an ambush deep underground. Later, after months down there with the rats and sewer runoff, they come out surprisingly rested and strong.

Bane is a formidable foe, and he certainly is of equal menace to Scarecrow (Batman Begins) and the Joker (The Dark Knight). I did like his raspy cackle in that mask; he almost had a Victorian speech pattern, grandiose and rich. Like all the villains, though, Bane's motivations don't make any sense. He wants to destroy the city, so first he bankrupts Bruce Wayne in a gutsy move on the stock exchange? Why do that at all when he has a neutron bomb in his hip pocket? (Yes, yes, I understand that Bane had to force Wayne's hand, to make him relinquish his seat on the board so as to get the bomb. It all just seems like play-acting, though, and meaningless fluff on Bane's part.) Rush Limbaugh says Bane is an attack the Romney headache of Bain Capital. I would presume to think he also calls Bane's attacks on Gotham's elite a veiled attempt to support Obama's tax on the rich. That might make sense in a movie where the villains are sophisticated crooks instead of raging madmen. And how does Rush justify Batman, who comes in to save the poor and the rich? I wish I could beat up on Limbaugh more, but Bane is such an enigma that I have to cut him some slack. 

Meanwhile, as Gotham crumbles, Batman is — minor spoiler alert — 3,500 miles away locked in an infamous pit-prison with a broken back. Outside his cell a TV screen blares back violent images of home. A man fixes his protruding vertebrae by punching it, which in another movie would be called a finishing move. This is one of the marvels of this film: I had no idea where it was going. The other comic movies are satisfied with the same rehashed plots, but this one aimed for something fresher and more visceral. Even more interesting, and perplexing, is how often we actually see Batman. Very little until the whopper finale.

Dark Knight Rises juggles many plotlines, and many new characters, including master thief Selina Kyle (real-life Catwoman Anne Hathaway) and super-cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Dark Knight Rises explains Catwoman’s fetishwear (they’re stealthy ninja-burglar pajamas), though she feels unnecessarily forced into developments in the plot. Something about fingerprints and stock trades, some of it is difficult to follow. Even worse is the Blake character, who is given lots of expositional dialogue no one asked to hear. The guys at the station probably never ask if he wants coffee in fear of a roaming explanation about his character’s history down to past pets and shoe size. He’s given a long scene in the finale that literally has no bearing on anything: he takes a bus full of kids to wait on a bridge where nothing happens. I greatly admire Gordon-Levitt — can we call him JGL? — but he needed more to do and less to say.

The bulk of the film plays out within Bruce Wayne’s tortured soul, where he will forever struggle to validate Batman’s cursed reputation. Keep in mind, Batman finished the last movie as a villain, a fall guy for Dent’s final duo-toned misdeeds. Being the Bat, it seems, is more burden than anyone realizes. Characters played by Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman — all of them great — return to offer advice, some of it contradictory, but I liked Batman’s ambiguous motivations that seemed to all at once confirm and counter his advisors’ warnings. Some fans identify with Iron Man, Spider-Man and Thor, maybe because their powers seem, for lack of a better word, cool. But Batman seems tormented by his very existence, and that translates very well into this film.

Now, I’ve mentioned how the movie resonates on an emotional level within Batman’s psyche, but let me reassure you there is action. The opening scene has a nifty plane extraction, and then there are long sequences of Bane’s mayhem, including one showstopper at a football game. The Batmobile returns, as does the Bat-cycle and a new Bat helicopter, which the film turns into a rather believable vehicle. The last sequence, a bruiser of a third act, converges all of these elements together in a Gotham free-for-all.

These sequences are exciting because Nolan is a skilled storyteller, and the horn-heavy Hans Zimmer score certainly helps, but what Nolan is terrible at is directing action. His scenes make little visual sense. Cameras are placed at angles that destroy the forward flow of the action. Scenes are choppy and they can be difficult to determine what we’re seeing, or where it’s happening. Some effects are just boring and uninteresting, like when Batman fires a light-gun at a fleeing motorcycle and all it produces is a wimpy burst of sparks. One chase scene takes place in daylight, moves into a tunnel and by the time they come out of the tunnel it’s dark outside. For such an anticipated film, the detail really is lacking.

There’s also some serious issues with guns. No one knows how to aim. Now, this is a pretty standard Hollywood cliché, the bad guys can’t shoot for shit, but this is stretched a little too far. Maybe the characters should purchase their ammo from better manufacturers. Or maybe just bend the barrels from their perpendicular position on the gun stock so they point, you know, out in front of the shooter. In one sequence, bad guys spill out of a bar into an alleyway with some SWAT guys right behind them. Bullets are fired, but it seems no one ever gets hit. Later, a worse offense: thousands of cops run down a street to meet an army of Bane’s men. Everyone is armed, but there they run toward each other like they’re auditioning for Braveheart. Who brings their fists to a gunfight? Everyone in this cast. Eventually the two sides start trading shots, but only a handful of men fall down. I know the film is rated PG-13, but surely they could have hinted at a bloodbath. As it looks here, it’s as if everyone is firing with blanks. Finally, notice the one Bane henchman who wears these giant bullets on his flak jacket — I don't think he ever fires a gun to which those rounds would fit into.

Is all this going to keep you from enjoying The Dark Knight Rises? Unlikely. It didn’t stop me. I had a blast. (I especially enjoyed the hyper-crisp IMAX picture. It’s worth the extra ticket price.) Some of the movie made my stomach swirl, my heart race and my breath shorten … it really does give appropriate weight to Batman’s journeys and trials.

Where the film really exceeds, though, is with its conclusion. It ended. I wish more films would honor their characters as much. After all, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. Spider-Man doesn’t get that, which is why Spidey movies will be in theaters until we’re all sick of looking at him. That hasn’t happened to Batman. Nolan gave him a proper send-off and we should be grateful that a superhero story was given such respect.

And really, this is the definitive Batman. Anything else would just be a footnote.