Okay, since the rest of the thread is going to pretend this trashfire of a finale is "fine," I'll have to state the truth. TDKR is kind of terrible. None of it makes any damn sense, it's a completely ridiculous way to follow up the ending of TDK, and even forgiving the derailment of losing Heath Ledger and thus not being able to use the Joker, it's a trainwreck for most of its runtime. It could not be more obvious that Jonathan Nolan wrote Begins and TDK, and Goyer wrote TDKR as Nolan transitioned to Person of Interest. TDKR has all the hallmarks of Goyer's sloppy, terrible plotting and inability to make pieces fit together or characters behave as human beings.
Let's just take the basic premise of the story:
1. So the scheme hatched to blame Batman at the end of TDK...worked. Perfectly. So instead of focusing on the hunt for the Dark Knight alluded to in the final moments of the last film, you're just gonna...jump over that? Or it didn't happen at all? Bruce just went home and never went out again? For 8 years, Gotham has had low crime and a civic hero in Harvey Dent. The only person who has a problem with this seems to be Jim Gordon. Why is this a problem? Blame the basically fictional urban legend, get better life for everyone in the city. Sure, Bane shows up but why does Batman have to, you know, dress as Batman? Just put on tactical gear and fight him under a different name, like Deathstroke or something. Who's gonna know?
2. Wait, eight years? Why is there an eight year time jump from TDK to TDKR? Nobody looks almost a decade older. Bruce has crippling knee problems eight years later from being Batman for like 10 months?
3. Why does the orphan kid ask Joseph Gordon Levitt if Batman is coming back? If crime is so much better why would anyone want Batman back? What's he going to solve? For that matter why does an 8 year old kid even know who Batman is or care? The events of TDK took place about the time this kid was born.
4. Whoops, the 8 year time skip was so JGL's character could have seen Batman as a kid and recognized his "orphan eyes" (wtf?) but now be an adult cop who can take up the mantle of the bat at the end. Goyer disrupted the entire flow of the story for this, for some reason. The 8 year skip makes zero sense in any other context.
And that's just the starting point of the plot. That doesn't get into Bane's complete lack of endgame, Talia's non-plan, the notion that Bruce Wayne would abandon his psychosis to go hang out in cafes, healing back injuries with well-placed punches, who painted the flaming batsymbol on the bridge, the clumsy way of getting Alfred out of town (maybe he painted it on his way out), the awful action choreography, Catwoman's inclusion purely as a replacement Rachel to give Bruce an arbitrary "happy" ending, and the general empty-headedness of the entire film in comparison to its predecessors.
In the long history of trilogies blowing it in the third film, TDKR is an all time champion. It's one of the biggest drops in quality from one sequel to the next in the history of film, and that would be true even if TDK wasn't as good as it is. Is it the worst superhero film ever? Of course not, it's not even the worst Batman film ever, but it's a distinctly bad effort in a trilogy whose first two entries are top of the genre work.
