By JAMES DAWSON
Front Row Features Film Critic
Bloated, boring and obsolete on arrival, “The Dark Knight Rises” is the least fun you’ll have at a superhero movie all year. This final chapter in director/co-writer Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is so relentlessly dull that its sparse action scenes play like obligatory afterthoughts. Compared to the joy-ride thrills of “The Avengers” and the sweet sentimentality of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” this stodgy slog looks positively constipated.
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been living as a detached recluse for eight years since taking the blame for crimes he didn’t commit at the end of 2008′s “The Dark Knight.” He is enticed back into action after his dead mother’s pearls are stolen by Selina Kyle (an adequate if unexciting Anne Hathaway), who ominously warns him that “a storm is coming.” Although Kyle plainly is Catwoman and later shows up in costume she never is referred to by that name, which sums up the movie’s misguided sense of dignified decorum.
