10 Iconic Villains Who Deserved Much Better Deaths

3. Bane €“- The Dark Knight Rises

Reinventing the hulking villain was never going to be easy thanks to the ghosts of the past, but up until the third act switcheroo, Christopher Nolan managed brilliantly.

The casting was nailed on (even if the vocals were a little odd) and the character design was impeccable: we really believed he had the capacity to break Batman like a twig over his knee. But then, just as Batman was getting the opportunity to get his own back, after a magician had punched his spine back to health, Catwoman burst in on her bike and shot him to smithereens.

No honour, no final stand-off, just a big hulk shaped hole where Tom Hardy used to be.

How He Actually Deserved To Die

Nolan's iteration of the character healed a lot of wounds for the character after Joel Schumacher did his level best to ruin him, and turn him from a real threat into a blunt object, and it mostly came thanks to the reinforcement of Bane's physical threat to Batman, as well as his genius intellect. Bane was Batman's equal, if not more, thanks to Wayne's fragile, unconditioned state, and taking him down should have been presented as more of an ordeal.

Given how Bane's urge to make Wayne suffer drove the narrative, with a deeply personal edge, the smart resolution would have been for the tables to turn and Wayne to make him suffer, as he was before Catwoman's unnecessarily heavy-handed response, that turned the threat into no more than a glorified henchman.

Because of the narrative twist that turned Bane into a puppet, Batman never got to overcome the personified threat he represented, and as a result there wasn't anything but symbolic redemption for him, which is why it was so fitting to see Bruce Wayne limp off into the sunset and ignore his duties. He was emasculated, robbed of his threat and retired all in one moment, and of course he should have run away to play happy families with Selina Kyle.