Despite taking wildly different approaches to the character, both The Dark Knight Rises and Batman & Robin make the same mistake with Bane. Portrayed by brooding, bald Tom Hardy in Christopher Nolan's trilogy-capping epic and Robert Swenson in Joel Schumacher's much-derided, neon-lit disaster, Bane is arguably one of the best-known and most popular modern Batman villains. Nevertheless, despite the character's status and the completely distinct interpretations on display in the two movies, both Nolan and Schumacher actually made the same mistake when realizing Bane on the big screen.
In both The Dark Knight Rises and Batman & Robin, Bane – a character most famous for being the villain to finally "break the Bat" – ends up being relegated to henchman status. In Batman & Robin, Swenson's version is a roaring personality vacuum, reduced to monosyllabically growling back at his handler, Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy. Meanwhile, although Tom Hardy's take on the character has a much more prominent and more nuanced role, The Dark Knight Rises' third act twist ultimately confirms that Bane is nothing but a pawn working at the behest of Marion Cotillard's Talia al Ghul. In both cases, what could have been one of Batman's most compelling opponents is reduced to being a glorified bouncer, doing a disservice to Bane's legacy and onscreen potential.
Bane Didn't Need To Be Talia's Protector In TDKR
Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises was generally well-received on release by both audiences and critics. However, the biggest issue many had with the movie was that its Talia al Ghul reveal added an unnecessary layer to what was already a compelling story of redemption. The fact that, in revealing Talia al Ghul as the mastermind behind the whole operation, the movie demoted what had hitherto been an extremely compelling foil for Christian Bale's Batman made the decision doubly egregious.
Before Talia's unmasking, Hardy's Bane had proved to be a sinister, muscular presence – proving himself more than a physical match for the aging Bruce Wayne, and acting as a different sort of supervillain than Heath Ledger's iconic and inescapable Joker from the previous movie. While there were issues with the character, notably his inadvertently hilarious voice, Hardy did imbue Bane with a genuine malevolence. This innate sense of power, however, began to dissipate as soon as his true role was revealed. Reworking the character as Talia al Ghul's protector, therefore, was a major misstep in The Dark Knight Rises – one which ultimately prevented its Bane from reaching the level of other legendary Batman villains and compounding Schumacher's earlier mistake.
TDKR Almost Fixed Bane After Batman & Robin
What's especially frustrating for many Batman fans is that The Dark Knight Rises did so much to redeem the character after his laughable portrayal in Batman & Robin. While there are some who feel that Schumacher's 1997 flop continues to be unfairly treated, the fact remains that the film's version of Bane rewrites one of Batman's historically most-cunning and physically capable opponents into a crazed, barely discernable meat-head. Although his dependency on Venom and general appearance is perhaps more comic-accurate, Schumacher's near-voiceless Bane is a much less compelling presence than his source material counterpart. In this regard, at least, The Dark Knight Rises went some way to fixing the masked man.
Christopher Nolan's Bane is shown to be both incredibly adept at hand-to-hand combat, but is also an expert tactician, waging a psychological war on Gotham to bring its population to heel. Through clever political messaging, he is able to obscure his true intentions and come perilously close to reducing the city to "ashes". Although Nolan's grounded Batman universe ignores attributes like Bane's superstrength and Venom dependency, Tom Hardy's version is nonetheless much more true to the original character. As such, although The Dark Knight Rises still ultimately portrayed Bane as a sidekick, the movie went a long way towards fixing the figure that had previously featured in Batman & Robin.