Re-Bourne ... again and again and again

I knew what kind of movie The Bourne Legacy was when it typed out time, date and location details at the bottom of each new scene. So here we are in Maryland on Tuesday. Here is Wednesday afternoon in Alaska. Let’s jet to the Philippines at midnight Friday. Bring your passport to this one, you might need it.

Well, I’m lying. Not about the time stamps — that’s true, albeit cliché — but about when I knew what kind of movie Legacy would be. I guess I knew what kind of movie it would be in 2002 when I saw it the first time, when it was called The Bourne Identity.

See, there is a secret spy, more secret than most. His name is Jason Bourne. He had amnesia, but conquered it. Now he’s hunted by the people who created him, people in the United States intelligence community. He was played by Matt Damon in three movies with confusing titles: Bourne Identity, Bourne Ultimatum and Bourne Supremacy. The first one was solid, but the second and third were polarizing, especially with the labyrinthine motives of the many, many characters and also because of the choppy-blurry-shaky camera editing, which is now the norm in action films.

Now, in Legacy, here is Aaron Cross, a super spy like Bourne. Because of Bourne’s antics, the spy program that created Bourne and Cross is eliminated, which in the film’s universe means everyone is killed, their homes are pounded flat, their pets are sent to slaughterhouses in third-world countries and their complimentary subscription to Spy Monthly is canceled. And you thought the Tea Party didn’t mess around when it came to slashing government programs — these guys here are no joke.

Cross is targeted for execution, but escapes a drone-fired rocket in the Alaskan wilderness by forcefully feeding a wolf a surgical tracking device that he carved out of his pelvis with a hunting knife. (Let’s pause here while that last sentence marinates in your brain a little.) Anyway, what is happening to Cross is happening because of Bourne and at the same time as Bourne’s movies, which doesn’t make this a prequel or a sequel. It’s a tangential and simultaneous adventure, a midquel, if you will.

It would be a cool idea if it were somehow different than any of the other Bourne movies, but it’s more of the same: Spy is hunted, spy flees, other spies are recruited to find the spy, spy meets girl, spy saves girl, spy outwits other spy, and intercut into all this are boring people in suits stalking hallways and agonizing over satellite feeds. It’s the same thing all over again here, but this time with a new actor. This must be how those photographers at old-time photo studios feel: Every day is spent taking the same photo of families dressed as cowboys, and the only thing that ever changes are the faces.

The face in Legacy is a familiar one — Jeremy Renner. He gave us life and rage and pain in The Hurt Locker, and ever since he’s been a mindless action hero in The Avengers, Mission: Impossible 4 and now here as a Bourne clone. I admire Renner’s work, but I don’t see why his version of Bourne, or the whole movie for that matter, was even necessary. It all feels so familiar: the shootouts, the car chases, the Greco-Roman grappling in hallways. I guess if you want to see the same movie again, have at it with Bourne Legacy, made by a studio that is so smart it’s learned how to get people to pay twice for the same thing.

I’m being very critical, I know, but I expect more from movies. I’m dismayed when I see films plagiarizing themselves, or falling back on all the same ideas. Did no one want to explore uncharted territory? Just look at Rachel Weisz, an accomplished actress with a big bouquet of talent. She plays a marked-for-death scientist who spends much of the movie being pulled and thrown out of danger during shootouts and chase sequences. When she read the script did she not recognize Chain Reaction, the clever 1996 science-thriller where she does exactly the same thing?

Some of Legacy’s flaws are compounded by director Tony Gilroy’s insistence on linking the original trilogy with this trilogy (yes, expect two more Renner Bourne movies). There are new characters, like the grayish spy director played by Edward Norton, but much of the film goes out of its way to introduce old characters, old plotlines and random bits of Bourne minutiae to eventually link the two spy movies. So if you start to feel like this whole movie is meaningless filler — like rice in a Chipotle burrito — until we get to the inevitable shot in Movie 6 of Bourne and Cross spy-mashing together, don’t worry that’s normal.

All this random bits of plot might be great for fans of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels, but it all feels very confusing, like re-joining a TV show after skipping several seasons. Whole sequences are spent talking about Treadstone and Black Briar and Hirsch and Landy, but only the most hardcore Bourne fans will recognize these details and what they ultimately mean. And then there’s poor Scott Glenn, who’s given a two-minute role that makes no sense at all, though I’m sure the next film will give him a more substantial part that explains it. But then why introduce him here when it could have just as easily been done in the next movie?

I’m laying a whomping on The Bourne Legacy, but it’s not all bad. The action is thrilling, and there’s a motorcycle chase at the end that aspires to be the mother of all motorcycle chases. I liked how one character has no gun to shoot so she takes off her helmet and throws it at a pursuing spy. A scene at an Alaskan forest cabin is exciting only because the mood of the film hadn’t been set, and I was unsure of who the villain was. The tension ratchets tighter and tighter until the payoff, which turns out to be different than what I expected. Then there’s Renner, who is kinda marvelous as a spy. I wish the movie focused more on him than all the behind-the-scenes computer stuff. What would you rather see: Renner doing his spy mambo or Ed Norton staring at a computer monitor playing Space Invaders?

One more thing I must discuss: the spree killing. It came from out of nowhere. The sequence begins with a man coldly, methodically stalking and shooting unarmed victims in a science lab. I found the victims’ anguished pleading and cries to be especially horrific, and then gunshots ring out on the soundtrack and I felt like the film was punishing the audience. I’ve seen violent movies since the Aurora theater shooting, but none made me as uncomfortable as this. We live in a different world, and scenes like this will twist stomachs into knots. This film, a high-adventure spy movie with nothing to say, never earns the right to play with those emotions.

All totaled up, I did not like The Bourne Legacy. People who will pay again and again for the same action movie and Bourne fans — are they one in the same? — will probably love it. 

Something Lincoln This Way Comes

Some photos of Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln have been circulating online for several months now, including that one shot of him in a restaurant eating beet porridge (or whatever the famous actor eats while in character) but we’ve yet to see Day-Lewis as Honest Abe in an official press photo. Until today.

Today DreamWorks released the first publicity still for Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln book Team of Rivals. I knew Day-Lewis could pull off the look, but I was having a hard time picturing him as the lanky and awkward Lincoln, who look more giraffe than commander-in-chief. I was still picturing Liam Neeson, who was originally attached to the film as the 16^th president, in the lead role. Today’s photo, though, is quite convincing. Notice the sunken cheeks and that crooked line his nose makes as it descends down to the pursed lips and mustache-less beard. It’s all very authentic.

And did you see who stars in the movie? It’s like a who’s who of great actors: Tommy Lee Jones, Jackie Early Haley, Mad Men’s Jared Harris, Sally Field, David Straithairn, James Spader, John Hawkes, Bruce McGill, Tim Blake Nelson and Hal Holbrook. Also, Lena Dunham’s boyfriend character from HBO’s Girls, Adam Driver, who will hopefully not do the vile things he does on Girls.

Oh and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in it as the president’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln. I’m putting this at the end, almost a footnote, because JGL is in everything this summer. I mean, come on, the guy showed up to my wedding for heaven’s sake. (Joey, thanks for the empanada maker.)

Total Recall remake is stupid sci-fi fun

A tragic footnote must be included with any science fiction film. It should read: "The man who most likely influenced — or outright wrote — the story you are about to watch never saw his science fiction become science non-fiction."

Renowned sci-fi author Philip K. Dick was around for the moon landing and the early stages of the home computer, but he missed the wireless phone, the internet, the mapping of the human genome. And then, on the cusp of serious advancement in the fields of science and technology in the early ’80s, Dick died, within four months of the release of the first film adaptation of one his works, Blade Runner (book title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?).  

What does all this have to do with Total Recall? Not much, other than the obvious: Dick wrote the story it was based on, though he called it We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. I think he'd get a chuckle at all the CGI involved in a movie like Total Recall: "So a computer made this movie then?" he'd ask wryly. "That would make a great story."

Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a factory worker in a future Britain. Every day he makes a 17-minute commute from Australia through the middle of the planet. As the giant elevator car passes through the molten core, gravity reverses and the elevator's downward momentum is turned into upward propulsion. Outside the windows it looks very hot and bubbly. And you thought your morning commute was bad.

Quaid is bored with his life, but with a wife like Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who slinks around in various underthings, you'd think he would be happier — "I give good wife," she tells her husband. One day after work he goes into Rekall, a company that will implant memories into his head, because if the memory is real enough it feels like it actually happened even if it didn't. Quaid asks for the spy package and he wakes up in the middle of a spy caper with him as the reluctant star. But is this an elaborate memory implantation or was his brain fried by the Rekall scientists? And what role does Lori, who is now trying to kill him with her thighs, play in all this?

If you've seen the 1990 Paul Verhoeven version of Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling tracking devices from his nasal cavity, then you know the answers already. The 1990 version had some memorable quirks — the robotic JohnnyCab driver, seductress Sharon Stone, Martian belly-monster Kuato, three-breasted hookers, the prosthetic head mask babbling "Two weeks! Two weeks!" — but it was also one of those dated hyper-glam future movies that were common in early ’90s. Like Demolition Man or Back To the Future Part II, Total Recall felt phony and hollow, the product of Hollywood, not science fiction.

This version of Total Recall aims for a more serious tone and it achieves it if only by making the sci-fi grittier and the action more relentless. Much of the movie is linked by long chase sequences, including one involving cars that hover over an electro-magnetic grid. The scene took a wild turn when the chase descends to another level where the cars hang from the grid like gondolas on a ski lift. Other chases take place in a three-dimensional elevator shafts, and a rambunctious romp through a horizontally cascading apartment complex that dangles out over the rest of the city.

This Total Recall exists in roughly the same atmosphere as Blade Runner: the streets are rainy and dark, the cultures are a mega-mix of East-meets-West, neon signs light up the skyline, and pedestrian sidewalks are packed with extras wearing radical futurist costumes. I was dismayed to see so many neon dreadlocks and hear so much chirping-blurping dubstep rattling from the speakers. Apparently, in the future combs don't exist and they listen to music from 2011. I was also less than pleased with all the gunplay, which seemed downright old fashioned compared to some of the other future concepts. And really, will there be machine gun shootouts in a future where it's possible to have an elevator through the center of the earth? I like to think we advance past meaningless gun violence, and so did Dick.

Farrell plays the everyman just fine, although I'm pretty sure his accent changes throughout. Beckinsale is given lots of hero shots, but her husband, Len Wiseman, is the director so there you go. Jessica Biel turns up at one point, and she does a commendable job as an action heroine, but she looks too much like Beckinsale. When they fight in a hallway in the middle of the movie I couldn't tell who was punching who. Bryan Cranston, who's making TV history right now on Breaking Bad, turns up as the forgettable villain Cohaagen, a character played memorably by Ronny Cox in the original.

I mentioned above that Dick's writing has become "science non-fiction." Of course not all of it. Humanoid replicants, memory implantation, precognitive time cops and other PKD ideas are unlikely in our lifetime, but where he really advanced science fiction was his rationalization of these concepts. He always looked at how humanity accepted, or maybe did not accept, technology as the answer to the world's problems. Look at Steven Spielberg's excellent Minority Report to see Dick's worries compounded into a film's story. I would have liked to see more of those examinations here in Total Recall, but the movie seemed destined to avoid anything that couldn't be loaded into a handgun and fired at someone's head.

That's a critical argument I'm making against the film, but I did enjoy Total Recall. It was preposterous on many levels, but it also had a consistent tone and structure. I liked how it propelled itself forward from one action extravaganza to another. And I liked how it looked, acted and felt like a real science fiction movie. Those are becoming rare these days, which is strange because Philip K. Dick's stories have more relevance now than they ever have. 

Vertigo bumps Citizen Kane from top slot

Move over Charles Foster Kane, here comes Scottie Ferguson.

That second name not ringing a bell? It’s Jimmy Stewart’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 mystery Vertigo, which was just named the greatest movie of all time by British film magazine Sight & Sound. It bumped Citizen Kane from the top spot, where it’s been on every Sight & Sound list since 1962. Orson Welles’ Kane still made the list, this time from a new position, the No. 2 slot.

The rest of the list follows, in order: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Ford’s The Searchers, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Camera, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Federico Fellini’s 8½.

The Sight & Sound list, started in 1952 and voted on by film professionals around the world, is widely regarded as the go-to list of cinema greats. Refreshed every decade, the list is also known for its diverse assortment of movies, many of which average moviegoers might not recognize. Man With a Movie Camera, for instance, is a highly complex and technical experimental film from 1929; Tokyo Story is Ozu’s 1953 meditation on family and death; and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a silent film from 1927 is about a man’s dalliances with a mysterious woman, is much lesser known than Murnau’s more famous movie, Nosferatu.

As eclectic as the choices are, though, critics, film buffs and others flock to the Sight & Sound list above all others. Film critic Roger Ebert, who has notoriously disapproved of “greatest film” lists, votes every decade and usually discusses his choices before and after the list is released.

In a blog posted yesterday, Ebert wrote: “But let’s remember that all movie lists, even this most-respected one, are ultimately meaningless. Their tangible value is to provide movie lovers with viewing ideas. In the era of DVD, all of the films on the list are available; in 1952, unless you had unusual resources, most of them could be found only in a few big cities.”

This year’s top pick, Vertigo, is no stranger to the list; it has appeared at different heights starting in 1982. The once-forgotten and nearly lost Alfred Hitchcock mystery starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes, is about a police detective haunted by the fear of heights as he falls — get it, falls — in love with a dead woman, or perhaps her ghost. Shot in and around San Francisco, the film often resembles a dream, with Bernard Hermann’s hypnotic, dizzying score twirling around the edges. The picture is full of dread, doom and despair, but it all resonates on a higher plane of consciousness, like a theater of fantasy. First-time viewers often question whether it’s all a dream or not. (It’s not, but I will let you discover the rest.)

Vertigo also invented the famous reverse tracking shot, sometimes called a dolly zoom, where the camera moves away from a subject while the camera lens is simultaneously zoomed in. The effect, which can be unsettling to some, was used to simulate the film’s vertigo effect. The trick has since been used in hundreds of other movies, most noticeably in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

As for Citizen Kane, it may be at the No. 2 position on the list, but it will most likely still be called — by film scholars and movie snobs alike — the greatest film ever made. Welles directed the picture and starred as Charles Foster Kane, a media tycoon whose sudden rise and eventual fall perplexes some newsmen trying write his obituary. Their efforts are complicated when Kane utters his final word: “Rosebud.”

The 1941 film was nearly buried by history when newspaper industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who Kane was based upon, attempted to kill the picture before it was ever seen. It survived, though, especially in film schools, where students were taught about the film’s technical achievements including its many unique and groundbreaking camera effects.

Most of the pictures on the list are older films, including five that were released before World War II. The most recent film on the list is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968. To find a more recent movie than that you’ll have to turn to Sight & Sound’s director’s list, a separate ranking of movies voted on by film directors. That list includes slightly more modern movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

When it comes to finding some of these titles in the West Valley, it might be an adventure in and of itself. None of the West Valley libraries carry any of the titles in their limited DVD sections. Some of the films, like Kane and 2001, including many of the titles on the director’s list, are widely available at most video or electronics stores. Other films, like Tokyo Story or The Rules of the Game, are much harder to find. All of the films can be viewed using Netflix or similar subscription-based disc-by-mail services.

Here is the top 10 again, this time in pictures:

Vertigo

Citizen Kane

Tokyo Story

The Rules of the Game

Sunrise: A Song For Two Humans

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Searchers

Man With a Movie Camera

The Passion of Joan of Arc

8½  

You say you want a (Step Up) Revolution?

Admiration must be paid to a movie like Step Up Revolution. It promises dancing and, wow, does it deliver. No shortchanging here.

I've reviewed all the Step Up movies, almost always with wanton disregard for the actual dancing, which is frequently undercut by the atrocious acting or sloppy writing. Maybe I'm lightening up, or perhaps this Step Up is just a better movie, but I found it less grating than the others. Parts of it were even enjoyable. (Insert gasp here.)

This Step Up begins like many of the others: dancers are still spontaneously overcome by their joint-cracking, muscle-tearing dance moves. There's Boy Dancer and Girl Dancer and one of them always has a big audition that looms over the final 20 minutes of the movie. Boy Dancer usually has to teach Girl Dancer how to do a special dance move, which means he has to put his hands in some especially scandalous PG-13 zones and before long they're kissing on the dancefloor. After four movies of this, the plots really must write themselves.

Boy Dancer here is Sean (Ryan Guzman) and he works at a swanky Miami Beach hotel. Sean and his buddies sabotage public gatherings with their pre-planned flash mobs. They take over busy Miami intersections, art museums, cocktail parties and skyscraper lobbies. They call themselves The Mob and they make no attempt to distance themselves from organized crime. The mafia apparently don't dance. I don't blame the movie for this oversight because, after all, these kids have one-track minds — every second of their lives is devoted to dance. 

Step Up Revolution suggests flash mobs are performance art. That may be true, but the ones shown in the movie are some of the weakest forms. Flash mobs are less about the performers and more about the audience, especially the random pedestrians who open themselves up to personal discovery within the public spaces they occupy. People go to the theater for live shows, but with flash mobs the performance comes to them without warning, and by doing so it invokes a deeper commitment from the audience to watch, to participate and to interact. If this medium interests you, Google the flash mobbers Improv Everywhere. This is a group — with its black-tie beach parties, pants-less subway cars and frozen train stations — that is taking flash mobs into the realm of performance art. Rarely do they dance.

But here in Step Up Revolution, flash mobs are more ego-driven — "Hey, look what I can do!" They rarely involve the audience other than to fill the background. Does this make the dancing — mixtures of popping, breaking, krumping and random bits of everything else — any less effective? No, but Step Up has no clue what a real flash mob is.

Anyway, Sean teams up with his Girl Dancer, Emily (Kathryn McCormick), to take on a big corporation that plans on building a new hotel mega-fortress right where The Mob happens to practice and hang out. As it turns out, Emily is the daughter of the CEO, which adds lots of family drama to an otherwise banal "corporation is evil" plot. They often find themselves dancing to bass-heavy dubstep, which dates the movie for time and all eternity in 2011, with its humping fax machines and dial-up screech. 

People who enjoy dancing will approve of Step Up Revolution. And why shouldn't they? It's a wall-to-wall dance movie with many locations, a variety of dance styles and hundreds of talented dancers. I can't tell you if the dancing is technically challenging or innovative, but it looked impressive on a big screen as people twisted and turned, flipped over each other, slid under legs and, at one point, catapulted off the hoods of hydraulically-operated lowriders. I didn't mind all this high-octane spazz-dancing, but it did make me miss the grace of say Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers or Gene Kelly. Few dancers impress me like the greats.

You're reading my review correctly if you've understood my appreciation for this movie as a guilty pressure, so-bad-i'ts-good sorta thing. But Step Up does make a fatal error, though, one that is very hard to overlook. The whole movie is spent bashing corporations and their villainous pursuits of profits, even if it means crushing Granny's house into dust to put up one of those pools with a bar that extends below the water line. But at the end of the movie — right after The Mob finds out if they've saved the old neighborhood or not — an ad executive tells them he likes their work. "I do ads for Nike. We want to take their advertising in a new direction. What do you say you join us?" One dancer can barely contain himself: "Where do I sign?"

Nike is a huge corporation, one that has proudly sent almost all of its production to other countries, where claims of child labor, human rights violations and sweatshops have persisted for the last 20 years. By introducing Nike to the conversation — and then having The Mob accept it against their better judgment — it devalues the entire undercurrent of revolution in the movie.

What we need to do is flash mob the flash mob. Someone has to put a stop to their greedy corporate pursuits.

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.