This is difficult because its less that the performance itself that is the problem, than how it is executed. Tom Hardy is an undeniable badass presence as Bane and his fight scenes with Christian Bales Dark Knight are the best in all of the Batman films. However, as much as this dead horse has been beaten, it needs to be re-iterated Hardys dialogue is really difficult to understand and to absorb. The accent that he adopts is kind of cool and different, but thats also the problem it feels like its different for the sake of being different. When you then place a mask on top of this it really makes things tough because half of how we understand what people says comes from reading their lips as we hear the words. When you take that away our feeble monkey brains can become stumped. Hardys performance seems like it was probably amazing on paper, and probably seemed amazing on set at the time when everyone had a script and could read along. However for the laypeople in the cinema, it was just unnecessarily difficult, even with all the work they did in post-production to clean it up and make it sound better. It was disappointing because it detracted from what was a spectacular film and left the audience talking about minor details rather than the film as a whole.
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I have only loved three things my entire life: my family, Batman, and the All Blacks.
