I finally watched "The Dark Knight Rises"...

[Fairportfan]

...and may i say how much it was improved, i think, by the ability to pause it and go potty or just take a break from the dumb.

Immensely better than The Dark Knight, which threw away two of the best Batman villains - Two-Face by killing him before he ever got really going, and the Joker by a ham-handed characterisation. If Heath Ledger hadn't made the Ultimate Career Move just before the film came out, more people would have realised just how badly Nolan bungled the character. (There are two genuinely Jokerish moments in the whole film - "No, no, no! I kill the bus driver," and making the pencil disappear.

This film doesn't bother with a truly good villain (well, sort-of does, but too little too late); Bane is just as much a lame fanboy-favourite character as Venom in the Spider-Man franchise. That's actually to the good, since Nolan's lousy writing and direction of the character doesn't detract as much as it did in the previous film.

The first and third acts are pretty well-paced and directed/photographed/edited; it's the middle third or so - from the first confrontation between Batman and Bane up to Batman's return to Gotham City ranges from just plain dull to horribly tin-eared. Batman and Bane's hand-to-hand scenes are curiously flat and uninvolving. The prison sequence is too long and completely unnecessary. And dumb and pseudo-profoundly lame, too.

Since only one movie that i can recall that got a nuclear explosion in this sort of context even approximately right*, i'm not too upset at the stupidity involving every aspect of the bomb.

Overall, it's the best of Nolan's three ... which isn't saying a lot, actually.

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* Special Bulletin, if you're interested.