This “Dark Knight” ascends

Dark Knight Rises succeeds on every level, dispensing with the old bar and establishing a whole new one.

Even as I was watching and enjoying The Avengers at the beginning of the summer, in the back of my mind I was thinking about the likelihood that this film would kick its ass all over the place. But I needn’t have worried. Where The Avengers was a bubblegum rollercoaster without peer, Rises is more like a speeding cab ride through the bad part of town at midnight with a twitchy driver who keeps shouting about taxidermy.

The Avengers was a comic book brought perfectly to life; Rises is more like a doctoral thesis on the decline of western civilization at the dawn of the 21^st Century, plus superhero shenanigans and Anne Hathaway in a catsuit.

[I should mention the new Spider-Man flick here. It was a fine movie with breathtaking web-slinging CGI, and the new leads are adorable. Where it failed was in telling an origin story to a public who had just been acquainted with it a decade earlier in Sam Raimi’s superior inaugural Spider-Man effort. They would have done better to have maybe recapped the origin (with the new actors) under the opening credits, then told a fresher story, with a better villain. I mean, really, a 50-year rogue’s gallery to draw on, and they pick one from 1963? When Gwen Stacy wasn’t onscreen, or Spider-Man wasn’t swinging past skyscrapers, I was bored.]

I was never bored during Dark Knight Rises. I never felt its length, but I sure felt its weight. And its breadth.

Rises is an expansion on 2008’s “The Dark Knight” rather than an extension, completing a distinct three-film cycle, much the same way Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings series did.

Rises picks up plot threads left dangling in the previous film and follows them to their logical conclusions. It opens eight years after the events of the previous film, and on its surface, everything in Gotham is shucky-ducky. New laws have made the city a virtual police state, allowing Batman to retire and the mayor to plan to fire Commissioner Gordon, and it looks like the good times are here to stay.

Even Bruce Wayne, who has pissed away half his fortune on a clean-energy fiasco and retreated into self-imposed exile, still lives in regal splendor.

But underneath, specifically the sewer system that houses the villain’s base of operations, things are getting ugly and scary fast. As The Dark Knight nailed the nihilistic zeitgeist of its release (at a time when Bernie Madoff and the clowns on Wall Street were doing the dirty deals that would eventually lead to the banking crisis, but before they were caught), this film’s allegory is strikingly of a piece with current events, especially for a) a comic-book movie that b) was produced before ‘current events’ even occurred.

Listening to clips of radio funnyman Rush Limbaugh ranting and raving about the ‘coincidence’ [emphasis his] of the villain’s name and the name of Mitt Romney’s former engulf-and-devour firm being the same (Bane/Bain) as evidence of some kind of left-wing conspiracy has been just terrifically entertaining. Doesn’t Limbaugh think that if Christopher Nolan really did have a time machine, he would use it to go back and kill Hitler, not reconnoiter the future to score empty political points in another country’s electoral process?

I tell you what, though, if Christopher Nolan made a movie about it, I’d go see it. This guy hasn’t failed yet. Even 2010’s Inception, weighted down with the usually leaden presence of Leo DeCaprio, was a stunning achievement.

And in Rises, Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman gives the least mannered, most organic performance of his career. I like his work, but often find him one-note. One extremely intense note. But in Rises, he plays many shades of Bruce Wayne, and every one of them rings true.

Michael Caine is also especially good in what is an extended cameo as Alfred the Butler, as is newcomer Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing an earnest young cop, possibly being groomed to replace Commissioner Gordon.

But the movie belongs to Nolan and his co-screenwriter brother. It lives and breathes on their vision, and it breathes fire. It stands with Prometheus as this summer’s blockbuster popcorn epic unaccountably stuffed with ideas.

And as the swan-song in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the director makes sure it pays off magnificently. I’ve already read that a lot of reviewers found the film’s ending too pat, but excuse me if the filmmakers give their characters—and the audience—a little closure. If you want to see a movie where the ending leaves you scratching your head and wondering what the hell you just frittered away a couple hours of your life watching, go see a damn foreign film. Or anything by Jim Jarmusch.

If you want to see a film that you’re going to take home with you and live with for a good while afterward, get out to see Dark Knight Rises on the big screen.

It transcends its genre and damn near its medium.