Batman vs. The Law of Diminishing Returns

Your first Cadillac will probably be your favorite. Its something new, fancy and exciting. You'll always remember it. The next one may even top it if you're lucky. The third one? Now its just excessive. Ladies and Gentlemen, the law of diminishing returns.

The same law applies to movies. It has become increasingly rare to see a sequel top the original. The statistics are probably worse than even we think. There are the occasional Godfather Part II and Toy Story II's, but lets not forget, someone once made a sequel to The Whole Nine Yards. But success does happen occasionally. But riddle me this: has any trilogy's third installment been its best movie? Off the top of my head the only one that seems to be even plausible is The Return of the King, though I still contend The Fellowship of the Ring was the superior film.

Enter Christopher Nolan, who has been defying all sorts of laws since 2000's Memento violated the law that indie movies must be dripping with contempt for its audience. He's made a realistic super hero movie, a better sequel and then a Best Picture-worthy flick out of what could have been the premise for a 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. So yeah, he's pretty good. And he just made Batman 3.

So here's what he was up against:

1. Third movies in trilogies almost always suck (Shrek 3, Godfather 3, Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Carribean 3, Meet the Fockers, the list goes on...) This largely is because the writers run out of compelling plot lines for the same characters, and equally have a hard time advancing the characters past what they were in the first movie.
2. The Joker was a phenomenon and pushed everything up a notch and he's, uh, absent from this movie.
3. Bane can be hard to understand.
4. Batman can be hard to understand.

Well, somehow he pulled it off. By now we are all pretty sure that the film exceeded expectations. He did it by taking it in a different direction. I remember after The Dark Knight came out and Heath Ledger died, most people I talked to assumed that the Riddler or the Penguin would be the next villain. Those would have been the easy way of doing things. They're both better known than Bane. But the Riddler is essentially Joker-lite, and would have made the movie Dark Knight-lite. Bane is nothing like the Joker. He's not particularly charismatic, but he inspires extreme loyalty from his followers. He's not funny. He also doesn't seem to be completely evil to the core.

On that note, I believe I've previously noted how it seems like all of Spider-Man's villains become villains accidentally. Some villains develop out of spite, or justify their actions to the audience (or like in the 1979 B-Classic The Warriors where the villain explains his motive for an assassination "No reason, I just like doing stuff like that"). The League of Shadows seem to play out like tragic heroes. They believe they are fixing the world. So while Bane seems supremely violent and malignant, his first action to our chronological knowledge of the plot is to protect a child at the cost of himself.

Anne Hathaway was a lot better than I was expecting. Come to think of it, though, I'm not totally sure what I was expecting. Anne Hathaway just doesn't seem like an action star, she seems like a fairy tale princess or Mary Poppins. The performance does get a little too femme fatale for my taste at parts; but like Christian Bale's annoying Batman growl, I can overlook it.

Christopher Nolan always seems to cast movies like I cast movies in my mind. I just think of a familiar actor for every role, whereas real casting directors wade through piles of screen tests, especially for bit parts. But Christopher Nolan tends to cast people we've seen before: Matthew Modine and Brett Cullen in this movie, Anthony Michael Hall and Eric Roberts in the Dark Knight, Rutger Hauer and Ken Watanabe in Batman Begins. It works surprisingly well. Modine certainly competes for a SOAB award in this movie (Smarmiest of all Bastards), which is especially saying something considering Aiden Gillen was also in this movie. Talk about bringing your A-Game.

There are the plot hole questions we all can rehash: How did Batman escape the Bat? What money is he living on with Catwoman? Does he just become a stay-at-home husband, while she brings home the bacon, presumably by stealing it? How many times did he go to that restaurant waiting for Alfred? The most troubling is Why does someone who has the name Miranda Tate have a French accent? That name sounds pretty Anglo-Saxon to me. Shouldn't that have been the first clue she wasn't who she said she was. Why not give her a French name? This is the troubling trend clearly started by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man with most grotesque German Accent of the 80's. His character's names: Douglas Quaid... Jack Slater... John Kimble... HOWARD LANGSTON... JERICHO CANE... ADAM GIBSON!!!

All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to watch and do nothing.

Oh, and this is probably the best original three-quel I've seen to date.