Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy hasn't been shy about kicking the shit out of its hero. Batman Begins tracked the inception of the bat-identity, from the crime alley mugging that made him an orphan through to an L-train showdown with the false father that shaped and tempered his vigilante impulse. The Dark Knight broke his spirit by killing his beloved, maiming his successor, and nuking his reputation. What anguish does this franchise closer heap on everybody's favourite fascist? It makes him older, lonely, and infirm from his brief stint punishing criminality. The Dark Knight Rises ratchets up this torture by giving Bruce Wayne an opposite, an opponent that is both his physical and mental equal. An anti-Batman.
Bane is the idea that Wayne rejected at his ninja graduation - a lethal disciple dedicated to the extinction ideals of Ra's al Ghul's multiracial mujahideen. Where Batman has placed his faith in technology, augmenting his broken body with electronic leg braces and metal rending slash hands, Bane has cultivated an armour of muscle and swagger. He operates in daylight, dressed in a shabby football manager's coat and surrounded by scurrying generics. Contrary to his comic book antecedent this Bane does not mainline super-steroids. His bio-mechanical mask doing nothing other than add an electronic inflection to a voice that sounds like Sean Connery playing a Nazi scientist. Despite this, Bane is a horrifying physical presence. He towers and growls, tugging at his own neckline, fingers restless, desperate to break. Interactions with others are short, stunted exchanges that usually end with Bane's hands darting to their throat. His power is absolute. Bane is a fully realised, focused individual - the perfect foil to a caped crusader who has found himself unnecessary.
Unlike a Batman that prefers to whisper to his ruling class associates from shadows, Bane surrounds himself with derelicts and has them build the means to level Gotham. In this sense, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises is as much the Mutant Leader from Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Returns as he is Knightfall's luchador muscle-bomber. Like that character, Bane is (eternal?) youth, ferocity, and rhetoric. Qualities that have all but deserted a Bruce Wayne numbed by eight years eating soup in an empty castle. Although equipped with a variety of new toys, Batman is quite incapable of standing toe to toe with Bane. When first they clash, Batman rains blow after blow down on his opposite, barely able to stagger him. The Dark Knight arrived somewhere abstract and lawless during a protective custody sequence in which Harvey Dent's SWAT van came across a burnt out fire truck whilst invisible electronic insects buzzed on the soundtrack. The Dark Knight Rises does something similar with a sustained close-up of Batman wincing as Bane relentlessly hammers down on his skull. Teeth clenched, praying for it all to stop, he looks like a child. Batman, shrunken and utterly beaten.
It doesn't last. Bruce Wayne finds motivation down another well, and Bane's position as ultimate evil is retconned on the fly by a twist straight out of The World Is Not Enough. Bane and Batman's rematch is inconclusive, Bane's momentary wobble after Batman starts focus striking his breathing equipment leads straight into a rage power-up that allows him to put dents in marble. Bane is too big for this film. Too capable, too dangerous. Its heroes cannot stop him, he must be circumvented at a script level. Reduced to an idea, and subordinated by a deeper, more personal threat to Bruce Wayne's psyche, Bane becomes docile. A few moments later, he's jobbing for Catwoman. Bane isn't broken, or really even beaten. He simply leaves the frame, and the film, after he comes under artillery fire.
