10 Reasons You’re Wrong About The Dark Knight Rises

6. Bane Is A Solid Villain

There was an obscene amount of discussion pre-release over whether Bane would live up to the Joker. The very idea of a more brutish villain even hinted at an attempt to overcompensate for the loss of Heath Ledger, trying to avoid the opportunity for comparisons that using, say, The Riddler, would create. In terms of faithfulness to the comics, it's an interesting situation. In print Bane is given his jacked-up figure by the super-steroid Venom, which is delivered to him through the mask, obviously replaced by an equally as ambiguous painkiller system in Rises. Ultimately the differences are really no more extreme than with any other member of the Rogues Gallery in Nolan's movies. He's not a giant Mexican, but both the League of Shadows connection and relationship with Talia are well established in the comics. All that, however, is secondary to one big issue; how he works in the film. There's a physicality to Bane that was lacking from the previous villains, making his encounters with Batman incredibly fraught. And rightly so - after dispatching goons deftly from the shadows, coming up against Bane leads to scrappy fighting where all previous tricks go out of the window. Does he live up to the Joker? No. Does he work as a great screen villain in his own right? Oh yes.