Rated PG13

Writer/director Chris Nolan has gone to great lengths to indicate to his audience that he considers his work to be less about traditional filmmaking and more about magicianship. He seems at his happiest, and most effective, when he’s tricking us. Right out of the gate, his first film, “Memento,” showed an extraordinary glee with twisting convention back around on itself and keeping his audience guessing until the last moments of the movie. His skill at this sleight of hand has escalated throughout his career, through the provocatively meta movie “The Prestige” and, most notoriously, in 2010’s hypnotic blockbuster “Inception.”

His Batman films are no different, revising the preposterously campy adventures of an avenging caped crusader into layered, captivating investigations of identity, solitude, conscience and politics. His inclination to tricksterism, given full flamboyant embodiment in the form of Heath Ledger’s legendary portrayal of Joker, may have been the key ingredient to the whopping crazy success of the second installment, “The Dark Knight.” Nolan was entirely in his element there, wrapping the silliness in so many layers of authentic pathos and human suffering that it was nearly impossible to notice how silly the whole thing actually was. That was some good magic.

But now, there’s evidence that Nolan is tiring of the magic show. Ledger’s tragic passing in 2008 had a profound impact on the director. He actively refused to commit to the third film in the series for a solid year after the second made its worldwide splash, and only agreed on the terms that it would unquestionably be his final trip to Gotham. In the end, whether just for the paycheck or out of some sense of responsibility to the franchise he started and the fans he fired up, he did it. He went there. As they say in the biz, the show must go on.

But, the trouble is, much like Batman himself, Nolan’s return seems reluctant at best, and a little spiteful, too. It would appear Nolan’s enthusiasm has gone crooked, his glee has turned to downright cynicism, and though he retains formidable strengths (his smoke made of sustained emotional tension between a dozen of our generation’s finest actors; his mirrors the unparalleled camera work of longtime collaborator Wally Pfister and the constant, thrumming, mesmerizing score by Hans Zimmer), he has apparently lost his belief in the value and intelligence of his audience—and with it the subsequent care he would usually take to earn their suspension of disbelief.

Because here’s the thing: If one looks even briefly through the smoke and mirrors, at its core, “The Dark Knight Rises” is thoroughly, almost maliciously ridiculous. The movie arguably continues the Nolan tradition of projecting all the opposing dualities inherent in the Batman mythos (vengeance vs. justice, order vs. chaos, individual vs. institution and, very conspicuously in this round, have vs. have not) onto the wretched streets of Bruce Wayne’s hometown, with no clear resolutions ever made between them. But the problem with this round is that, from start to finish, not one plausible thing happens. It all feels completely contrived; plot, story, characters. It’s all artificial, contrived, phony. So phony, in fact, that the whole act is overcome by a mounting awareness (the death of any magic trick) that Nolan is actually just toying with us—mocking his own creation and daring us not to laugh while he does it.

Think Batman’s “growly voice” was stupid? Meet Bane (played by Tom Hardy, who is, if nothing else, remarkably large, a real acre of flesh, that one), whose permanently installed face mask and bizarre vocal intonation make him sound like Stewie Griffin running a Taco Bell drive-through. Think Maggie Gyllenhaal was a little too full of herself in “The Dark Knight”? Well, wait till you get a load of Anne Hathaway as cat-burglar Selina Kyle, all cheesy one-liners and razor heels and licking her eyebrows while she struts off with your wallet (no one ever actually calls her Catwoman, but her ever-present night-vision goggles that flip up into cute little kitty ears are sort of a dead giveaway.)

Most of the themes are lifted directly from the first film, “Batman Begins,” which could afford some penetrating thematic echoes if they weren’t lifted quite so verbatim. To wit: A nasty creep from Batman’s alma mater, The League of Shadows, surfaces with a nefarious plan to destabilize Gotham using first, economics; second, a scheme to incite revolution by cutting off an island, trapping the cops, and releasing prisoners into the streets; and third, an advanced bit of hijacked weaponized Wayne Enterprises technology to threaten the population. Though the scale may have been amplified, this note-for-note replay of the first film seems beyond lazy, and made no better by the fact that the weaponized Wayne Tech is a Big Round Bomb with a countdown clock.

Any potential significance that might be deduced from Nolan’s other references to classic Batman stories like “Knightfall” (in which the Bat’s back is broken by Bane), and “No Man’s Land” (in which Gotham is cut off from the world by a series of devastating natural disasters) or even Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” (in which violent revolution results in only worsening chaos and disarray for the protagonists) are pretty immediately undone by the fact that this exact Big Round Bomb shtick was used in the 1966 “Batman: The Movie,” starring Adam West. Seriously. This alone sinks what had been pure magic right into some gawdawful Hokum Pocus.

Beyond that, there are important elements in this film, far too spoilery to cite in this review, that Nolan had previously insisted he would absolutely avoid, and a few things that don’t happen that he’d promised to include. The difference between a trick and a lie may simply be the difference between a promise kept and a promise broken, sure, but either way, Nolan’s grasp on the honesty of his showmanship appears to be slipping here. Deliberately or not, “The Dark Knight Rises” comes off as either its creator’s wail of despair, or the Joker’s last laugh. Maybe both.