Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy reaches its darkest climax

THE Dark Knight Rises is a visually powerful and intelligent blockbuster that also has some sharp things to say about the way we live now.

TEN minutes into Christopher Nolan's spectacular The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne's major-domo cum surrogate father, Alfred, urges him to rejoin the world he has abandoned. "There's nothing out there for me," the broken billionaire replies.

But he's wrong. There is something out there for him, and we know this because we've met him, in the pulsating opening set piece (a mid-air plane hijack) of the third - and we're told final - instalment in Nolan's Batman trilogy.

He is Bane (actor of the moment Tom Hardy), an evildoer who appears to be Batman's equal and, necessarily, his part reflection. The hulking, articulate Bane is such a near doppelganger for the bikie berserker Humongous in Mad Max II that it's difficult to believe the character was not an inspiration, especially as Nolan elsewhere pays homage to Dirty Harry and other classics of vigilantism.

Like Humongous, Bane's face is covered by a metallic mask, in this case to ease unspecified but agonising chronic pain. It makes him sound oddly like Sean Connery, but there's no twinkle in his eye. (Interestingly, Hardy has been cast as Mad Max in the much-delayed fourth instalment of George Miller's post-apocalyptic series.)

So, we have our super villain and our superhero, Batman (Christian Bale). Within 30 minutes we meet most of the important characters: old faces such as Alfred (Michael Caine, in his most nuanced performance in the role) and police commissioner Jim Gordon (a superb Gary Oldman), and new ones including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the good-hearted, hot-headed rookie cop John Blake, Marion Cotillard as philanthropist and potential love interest Miranda Tate and Anne Hathaway as a sexily calisthenic Catwoman. Australia's Ben Mendelsohn shines as a venal corporate raider and Morgan Freeman returns as Batman's gadget man Lucius Fox.

This rapid set-up of who's who leaves more than two hours of film time for the thing we will fill the cinemas to see: the action, and Nolan and his long-time cinematographer Wally Pfister do not disappoint. Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Night (2008), brimming with the fearful possibilities of organised crime and domestic terrorism, can now clearly be seen as the build-up to a full-blown war movie. But it's a war movie without an enemy combatant in sight (except in allusions to the US's real-world mistreatment of them). This is civil war; it's Occupy Wall Street with guns, and with the promise-threat of green energy thrown in for good measure.

The Dark Knight Rises is set eight years after its predecessor, which ended with Batman taking the rap for the murder of district attorney Harvey Dent and hanging up his cloak. Wayne is a recluse, hobbling around his empty mansion, and Gotham City is becalmed. Into this phony peace strides Bane and his army of mercenaries with a plan to "liberate" the metropolis on behalf of the dispossessed, by which he seems to mean the 99 per cent of citizens who have not made a killing on the stockmarket.

This is a superhero film that taps into the prevailing economic insecurity and Nolan intriguingly remains on the fence throughout. In a brilliant sequence Bane and his men storm the bourse. When a trader says, "This is the stock exchange, there's no money here for you to steal," that's a funny line on its own. Then Bane delivers the punch, and the punchline: "What are you doing here?" Later, when the world is going to hell and the doomsday clock is ticking, when policemen are in hiding and doormen are bashing millionaires in the streets, the camera races past that institution of upscale retail therapy, Saks Fifth Avenue, which stands defiant amid the chaos.

Bane is skilled in the rhetoric of class warfare and more than handy at regular warfare, too. Why is he doing it? The venal billionaires seem to think he's working for them but that proves to be yet another bad business decision. Bane's reasons go to the dark places, literal, emotional and spiritual, that make Nolan's films much more than something to pass the time while eating popcorn, and which make Bale's haunted hero the best Batman we've seen.

Bane, too, feels the betrayal of trust, the soiling of innocence, that emanate from the heart of the Batman story.

Rather than turn his back on the city that has turned its back on him, Batman returns, rises, to take on Bane. When Catwoman says he's already given the city everything he has, he rasps, "Not everything. Not yet." And so the scene is set for the question everyone has been asking since Nolan announced this film would be his last with the caped crusader: will Batman die? His great appeal, after all, lies in his ordinary mortality.

Needless to say I'm not going to reveal what happens. Viewers will want to experience every twist and turn and thrill and spill for themselves. But I will say the ending defies convention and of course is the richer for it.

Yet while Nolan, the innovative director of Memento and Inception, rattles the shackles of the action thriller genre he doesn't shatter them. He dutifully delivers the high-speed chases, the ticking time bombs and the gladiatorial street fights between the agents of good and evil, and there's nothing wrong with that.

With few exceptions - Matthew Modine's deputy police commissioner is thinly predictable - his characters are complex. The Dark Knight Rises is a visually powerful - almost half the film was shot with IMAX cameras - and intelligent blockbuster that also has some sharp things to say about the way we live now.

The Dark Knight Rises (M)
3-1/2 stars
National Release