As "The Dark Knight Rises" opens - picking up eight years after the events chronicled in "The Dark Knight" - we find eccentric billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a rather depressed state of mind. He has essentially withdrawn from the world, given up his crime-fighting ways and hung up his Batman cape, having largely fallen out of favor with the citizens of Gotham City who see him less as a hero and more as an out-of-control killer. Only his loyal servant/father-figure, Albert (the venerable Michael Caine), cares enough to give him a swift kick in the rear-end every now and again to try to get him to move on with his life. All this changes, however, when the fascistic Bane comes to town, a figure so consummate in his villainy that he is willing to blow up the whole blasted metropolis with an atomic bomb if he doesn't get what he wants.

Though Christopher Nolan's latest entry in the series is nowhere near as engaging or as gripping as the previous two (especially the second), the movie attains a certain historical and contemporary significance with its echoes of both the French Revolution and Occupy Wall Street, though, oddly, the movie seems intent on putting us on the wrong side of history in both cases (rooting for a corrupt status quo and against a grass-roots uprising against that corruption).

And, let's face it, Heath Ledger's Joker - one of the richest villains in all of movie history - would be a hard act for anyone to follow, and Tom Hardy's Bane, even with his mask and amplified voice, seems a mite tame in comparison. On his own terms, however, Bane is reasonably effective, if only because of the implacable nature of his evil, which manifests itself in his willingness to sacrifice masses of innocent people to enrich his own power.

Thanks partly to the muddled politics and partly to the overstuffed nature of the storytelling, the movie never finds a way to fully engage its audience in the world it's created. In fact, in comparison to the narrative sturdiness of its two predecessors, "The Dark Knight Rises" comes across as a bit of a messy affair overall, with subplots spinning off in all directions, with little gravity at the core to bind it all together. A case in point: while Anne Hathaway brings a degree of flirtatious charm to the role of cat burglar-turned-Cat Woman, the character as a whole seems like an afterthought, tacked onto the story to provide some counter-balancing romantic interludes for the sullen, all but monastic Wayne.

The cast is rounded out by Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Aaron Eckhart and others, but, more so than in the two previous entries in the series, the real stars of "The Dark Night Rises" turn out to be the visual pyrotechnics and special effects.