The Dark Knight Rises, Seven magazine review Batman (Christian Bale) isn't naturally talented like Spider-Man, with his lazily organic power to shoot out a web: he has to work at it, with sweat and stomach-crunches, and carefully chosen, expensive accessories. With Batman, it's all graft. Maybe that's why he always seems so glum, and rarely glummer than here, resurfacing after eight silent years during which - for the greater good - he has wrongly taken the rap for the death of D.A. Harvey Dent. When he returns, his ancient butler Alfred (Michael Caine, perpetually on the verge of tears) tries desperately to persuade him to slip away in search of a little ordinary happiness. The Dark Knight Rises is a better and less grotesquely exploitative film than 2008"s The Dark Knight, which I disliked for its lingering, prurient depictions of the extreme torture meted out by Heath Ledger's Joker. The replacement villain is called Bane (Tom Hardy), who is less anarchist and more terrorist, and wears a black, tubular mask which covers most of his face and often makes him very hard to hear. He sounds as though he's speaking through cotton wool, while underwater. This is quite a disadvantage in a villain, who can claim the traditional right to what I call "the monologue of bad intent," in which he sets forth his nihilistic world view. Bane certainly exercises this right - you can hear much malign mumbling from underneath the mask, and worrying words cropping up - but you can only catch about 50 per cent of it. Nolan, it seems, knew full well about the Bane sound issue, but I'm not convinced that half-heard threats are really spookier: if someone goes to all the trouble of describing in detail how and why they're going to destroy you, it seems almost bad manners to say at the end: "You what?" Still, Hardy (whose prior experience playing the British lifer Charles Bronson must have come in handy here) has a talent for physical menace, and his fights with Bale have the visceral thump and grunt of the real thing. This film has some fine performances, from Gary Oldman as the exhausted yet perennially decent Commissioner Gordon to Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, a young Gotham beat cop who ends up at the heart of the action. Marion Cotillard and Anne Hathaway, as a sinuously ambiguous Catwoman, add both glamour and intrigue. I tip my hat to the sheer cinematic ambition of this film, revealed most audaciously in a scene at the Superbowl and in the wider shredding of the social fabric that echoes every revolution from France to Mao's China. Yet, at times, particularly in the first section, the film seemed a little bloated, curiously hard to get moving; and then, later on, for all its hectic energy, it occasionally left me cold. I respected The Dark Knight Rises; I didn't quite love it.