Review: The Dark Knight Rises

With the hype sky-high after the success of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's third and final installment in the Batman franchise was always going to struggle to match up to people's expectations - but quite how short The Dark Knight Rises falls will be a surprise to many.

The main problem with this final film is that whilst the success of the series has been in its realistic setting of the superhero's story in the modern world, too much of The Dark Knight Rises plot stretches the believability to breaking point, taking the viewer out of the film to question whether what happened actually made any sense.

That's not to say this is a bad film - there's plenty to enjoy in the action set-pieces and the performances of Anne Hathaway and the return to the fore of Christian Bale as The Caped Crusader himself, who is back inform after taking a backseat to performances from Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger in the previous film. Tom Hardy is good as his nemesis Bane, playing him more like a Bond villain than you may expect - it would be unfair to compare him to Ledger's Joker as they are very different type of villains, but Bane could've done with a bit more development to show why exactly he has managed to amass a cult-like army of followers.

The Dark Knight Rises also suffers from trying to cram too much stuff into one film - it would arguably have been better following the lead of the final installments of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises by splitting the story into two parts, as it feels like there is at least 4 hours of film crammed into 2 and 3/4 hours, with several minor characters introduced and subsequently getting lost in the shuffle, leading to some underwhelming moments the should be much more powerful as the film hurdles through several of its multiple endings, of which the final one seems a little bit too much like trying to repeat Nolan's trick from Inception, copping out from the proper ending that actually suited the story.