The supervillain Bane, who made his first appearance in the comics in 1993, was always a derivative character — can you say the Lord Humungus meets Doc Savage? — and while a bulked-up Tom Hardy does his best to breathe a bit of menace into him, an effort enhanced but also hampered by his word-obfuscating voice-box mask, the bottom line is this: Bane is simply no Joker!
The definition of how a movie can be grand and impressive on its own but still, in the end, far from good enough. The key mistake is basic: Nolan forgot — or simply didn’t realize — how much he’d raised the bar with “The Dark Knight,” and with Heath Ledger’s Method maniac performance as the Joker. The supervillain Bane, who made his first appearance in the comics in 1993, was always a derivative character — can you say the Lord Humungus meets Doc Savage? — and while a bulked-up Tom Hardy does his best to breathe a bit of menace into him, an effort enhanced but also hampered by his word-obfuscating voice-box mask, the bottom line is this: Bane is simply no Joker! Nolan needed to up the ante, to shock us with the audacity of villainy. Bane just seems like a bully lost in his bad dreams. And minus that threat of primitive scary excitement, the final adventure of Christian Bale’s Batman, while wholly watchable, gets buried in dour darkness, with Anne Hathaway’s salaciously nasty Catwoman providing the closest the film has to a spark of — dare we say it? — fun.