Movie trilogies are a tough thing to get right, especially if your aim is to tell an over-riding story, one that completes an arc, calls back to the elements that sent your characters on their journey and attempts to put things in a neat little package.

So, The Dark Knight Rises - as both director and star have said in interviews - will be the last time they visit the world of Batman.  Christopher Nolan's first, Batmam Begins, came out in 2005 to modest success, whilst the sequel, The Dark Knight in 2008, was one of the biggest hits of all-time.

The theme of falling and rising has been present from the very first film, with Bruce Wayne's father giving his son the advice, "What do we do when we fall down? We get back up."  Similarly Bruce had his first terrifying experience with bats when he fell into the bat cave near his family home.  In The Dark Knight the film looked at the rise of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and his fall from grace, and then, in an effort to preserve the good he had done to keep Gotham's streets crime free, Batman took the fall for him, becoming an outlaw.

It is eight years later when The Dark Knight Rises begins, Batman hasn't been seen since the death of Harvey Dent and Gotham has been peaceful since the passing of the Dent Act, which basically allows criminals to be locked up indefinitely.  More than that, Bruce Wayne has become something of a Howard Hughes-type recluse.

Unfortunately for him crime is about to return to Gotham in the bulky, mask-wearing shape of Bane (Tom Hardy).  Mixed up in all this is cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), good cop Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and businesswoman Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard).

Nolan throws in a lot of muddled shots towards capitalism in the early section of the film, but one action sequence almost borders on satire, as Bane's goons escape on motorbikes with stock trader hostages sat screaming comically on the back.  Unfortunately any potential humour or dark comedy is squandered, as much as the return of Batman is downplayed and lacking in the spine-tingling excitement of - for example - the first appearance of the Tumbler on Gotham's streets in Begins.

There is a cold, clinical and detached air that pervades the film, scenes and story strands that should resonate hurry along and shuffle awkwardly off screen.  One could argue that Nolan is attempting to cram too much into his closing chapter, but with 165 minutes to play with and a relatively straightforward story to tell this is more a case of poor editing and writing. 

For the most part characters speak in clunky expositional passages, the only people who manage to escape this curse are Joseph Gordon Levitt and Michael Caine as Alfred, managing to invest emotion in either the most ham-fisted and on-the-nose of lines.  Unfortunately, with regards to the latter, the story makes some choices that are emotionally frustrating from an audience and character point of view.

As the big bad Bane, Tom Hardy is physically impressive, and there's a certain playfulness to his peculiar accent - awkwardly sound-mixed in to try and get around earlier complaints that he was inaudible - that compliments the characters intelligence.  Unfortunately he has a very hard act to follow, leading on from Heath Ledger's The Joker, and the film doesn't give him any real moments to shine.  A few punch-ups with Batman lack wallop, and there's little else between the characters to earn an audience's investment.

Anne Hathaway makes for a fine 'Catwoman', but there's something almost irrelevant about her character, and she's lumbered with a lot of the films limp quips.

Much like The Dark Knight the film borrows heavily from Michael Mann's more talkative crime pictures, but in that film's case it worked in its favour, the thematic debates (order vs chaos) were so richly personified and visualised that you were perhaps more rivetted to the conversational scenes than you were the action moments.  Here the dialogue is stilted, muddied, lumpen and the action is marred by a lack of dramatic weight and a succession of rather peculiar decisions on behalf of the characters (see; the writers).

As far as closing off the trilogy, this film makes every choice you would expect them to make, repeating ideas already expressed and executed far more brilliantly in the previous two pictures.  For example, part of Bane's plan - as shown in the trailers - is to turn Gotham into an island by disabling all the bridges, a similar thing happened in Batman Begins when Arkham Asylum's doors were opened and fear gas was released across the city, there we had a real sense of a claustrophobia and a city rapidly going to Hell.  Here, nothing much seems to change, in fact the streets are a lot quieter, so probably safe to go for that jog you've been putting off.

To put this review into some sort of context, I enjoyed both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but did not feel that either of them were towering masterpieces.  The first is a pretty standard origins movie with a rather hackneyed final act, but it was an interesting and new take on the Batman legend.  The Dark Knight was buoyed by Heath Ledger's wonderful performance, he was a villain you could oddly admire as much as you wanted him to get his comeuppance, and he is the perfect antithesis of Batman.

The Dark Knight Rises feels a little lazy, it plays out the obvious beats but does so in an oddly joyless fashion.  It's pedestrian and workmanlike, sometimes it's an enjoyable novelty to be watching a superhero film that has an air of finality, but it ultimately doesn't resonate in quite the way it hopes and its final act is something of a damp squib.