Bane of my existence

In theaters Friday: The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda 2, The Tree of Life [limited]

New on DVD/Blu-ray: I am Number Four , Gnomeo & Juliet

A wise screenwriting professor once told me that a hero can only ever be as good as his villain is bad. I think that is so true. If the stakes are not high, then why should an audience bother caring at all?

Last week, Warner Brothers released the first image of multi-talented English actor Tom Hardy—you know him from Inception—as chiseled baddie Bane in next year’s The Dark Knight Rises. The final chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has only just now begun production, but the film’s closely-guarded plot, viral marketing campaign and globe-trotting shooting schedule is likely to keep movie geeks at optimum levels of geekery for the next 14 months until it actually arrives in theaters.

The film’s storyline may be a secret, but based on this one image, Bane will be every bit the dark, twisted challenge for Batman and the citizens of Gotham City that Heath Ledger’s Joker was last time around. Whereas the Joker wanted to break Batman psychologically and spiritually, but Bane seems designed to break Batman physically. So what constitutes a successful villain? A mask, a hood, an evil plot and an icy glare?

Some of my favorite villains of all time are those who say things that, when taken out of the often black-and-white context of their respective major motion pictures, doesn’t sound all that terrible. Ledger’s anarchic Joker was right, almost philosophical, when he called out the superficiality of Gotham’s criminals and its innocent civilians when he said, “It’s not about the money…Everything burns.” That Joker was based somewhat on Malcom McDowell’s transformational turn as Alex Delarge in A Clockwork Orange, a sadistic sort who nevertheless saw fit to put his love for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in such poetic verse as this: “Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”

From Darth Vader to Travis Bickle and Keyser Soze to Nixon, I think we enjoy seeing our heroes face someone menacing, someone whose goals are laden with a twisted ideology—even if they are based on a kernel of truth. At best, these are fallen angels who can’t be fixed so they must only be stopped. I don’t know what Bane’s ideology will be in The Dark Knight Rises, but for the character I am sure something somewhere along the line has gone terribly wrong, and the film will deliver a hero determined to making things right the easy way or the hard way. It’s just that the hard way ends up being much more fun to watch.