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A handful of things bothered me:
1) the showdown between the cops and the thugs was really ridiculous. How did unarmed men charge an opposition with automatic weapons and suffer only minimal casualties?
2) the magical healing of Bruce. A mysterious leg brace fixes a completely-gimp leg. A catastrophic back injury is cured by a prison mate. A seemingly-fatal stab wound to the chest is suddenly a non-factor.
3) Bane's voice. Wouldn't it have been nice if 30% of his dialogue wasn't completely unintelligible?

But, for the most part I was able to overlook that stuff. After all, it is a movie, so you've got to be willing to suspend your belief a little bit. And I actually thought the ending was really well-done. It didn't feel contrived, because they hinted at the auto-pilot stuff a handful of times throughout the movie. At worst, you fault it for showing him in the plane with 4 seconds left to explode; no, there's no way we he could've got out of the blast radius in that amount of time, but stuff like that is standard procedure in movies, so I'll give it a free pass. I found the closing five minutes of the movie downright breathtaking. I thought it was an extremely satisfying ending to an absolutely awesome trilogy.

I was okay with things such as Bruce Wayne's healing (knee, back, stabbed in side) as it is a comic book movie. The depth of character was a little shallow, as I think all of Nolan's characters really are. When people say that Nolan's characters are very deep aren't really paying attention. Most of his characters only exist to move the plot point along and drive the theme. Of the main characters, Catwoman had the most context, and then Ra's Al Ghul, who wasn't really in the movie.

I let the hokey ending slide as I was pretty much mesmerized by the last 8 minutes or so. Probably due to all the overt references to Batman comics of my youth. It had the perfect blend of Knightfall, No Man's Land, and Dark Knight Returns all throughout. The waterfall ending is pretty much the exact ending from DKR that Frank Miller wrote 25 years ago. It obviously sets itself up for a sequel if anyone wants to run with Robin as Batman.

Overall, it was a fun ride - not better than Avengers, just different. And if you read Marvel & DC back in the day, you could never really compare the two or pin them down - they're just both different. If you didn't like this movie or the Avengers movie I would suggest you stop watching this type of movie because you really don't get it.

the super duper unstable nuclear device that was so dangerous... that survived a bus crash, falling through the road, and getting directly banged into every piece of concrete in Gotham without going off.

I'm not really a fan of the ending. I'll give Nolan credit for setting it up properly by constantly pointing out that "Batman" was the hero, not Bruce Wayne. Still, it would've had a ton more teeth if either the bomb had gone off on Gotham or if Bruce Wayne had died, to completely subvert the superhero genre. People would talk about that for years. Instead, it's just a decent superhero movie that'll make a metric [expletive] ton of money and will be called the weakest of the trilogy for time eternal.

Where I really end up with the whole thing is that it was fine, a good popcorn flick. Regardless of whatever issues I have with the film, I had a good time watching it and that's a good starting baseline for success. But it's nothing special in the way that Dark Knight was.

1. Would it really be that hard to just rename John Blake as the proper name for the second Robin? Just name him Tim Drake, and it would have been fine. I could get over the difference in Tim Drake's storyline because it's really just a very minor side plot that shows up at the ending. Sidenote for you non-comic book geeks - eventually in the Batman comics the original Robin, Dick Grayson, left and became the superhero Nightwing. Tim Drake was a college student who discovered the true identity of Batman and asked to become Robin. He was trained by Bruce Wayne until eventually getting his approval and becoming the new Caped Crusader's sidekick Robin.

2. I thought Bane himself was a fine choice for the villian, although I wish they would have kept SOMETHING from his actual comic book storyline into the movie. In the comics, he was a super thin nerd born in a prison (part of which Nolan led you to believe happened in the movie) who had a science experiment performed on him that gave him the superhuman strength. Except in order to have the strength, he has to get a serum injected into his body - this is why all of the pictures of Bane have a [expletive] of tubes coming out of a backpack that are attached to his arms, back, and head. He was never trained or affiliated with the League of Shadows, nor was he ever Talia al'Ghul's bodyguard. He was able to figure out Batman's identity, and at one point broke his back in a fight (okay so that's the one thing that Nolan incorporated into the movie).

3. Anne Hathaway did a superb job as Catwoman. Not quite as good in my opinion as Michelle Pfeiffer did, but still an excellent job.

4. Re: the fusion reactor. Even overlooking what JL had mentioned, my buddies and I (who are also engineers at the nuke plant with me) got a big kick out of Dr. Pavel just reaching up and pulling out the "core" and then putting it in a different box. One buddy jokingly asked, "Where's his dosimeter?" Another asked, "Why do movie producers insist on a bright green glow for a nuclear reactor? The core glows blue, damnit."

5. I would have LOVED to see Killer Croc make an appearance in the sewer scenes. That would have been absolutely terrific.

Overall, like JL said, it was a good popcorn flick that I enjoyed watching. I don't know that I would see it again in theaters, but I own the first two, so I will likely buy this one on BR once it comes out to complete the trilogy.