As one of the toughest street-level villains of the DC universe, Bane hasn’t been much of a mystery for a long time now, but in The Dark Knight Rises, it’s fair to say that people were wondering why the mask was so badly needed. It’s possible that it was explained and people have forgotten, but the main point is that without the mask he would have been in excruciating pain the entire time. One has to remember that his time in the pit where he left Bruce Wayne to die was not a nice place, and after helping Talia al Ghul to escape, he was horribly wounded. The mask in this case was to keep him from feeling that intense pain so often since it delivered a powerful anesthetic that kept him capable of fighting and moving about without having to worry about the debilitating agony that would otherwise cripple him. His mask in the comics wasn’t an aesthetic choice either since it had to do with the need to pump Venom into his veins, thereby giving him a very big advantage in battle.
So there is a very good reason why Bane wears the mask in either version, meaning it’s not just a personal choice to do so unless one wants to count the fact that he could be in horrible, agonizing pain every second of his life without it. But with the painkillers pumping through his system continually, it does allow Bane to move about unencumbered and even appears to help give him a serious boost as he continues to be a threat to Gotham. The only time that things really start to go bad is when one of the tubes gets knocked loose, at which point it is seen that he’s in duress. Up until that point though he’s more than enough for Batman since not only were they trained by the same people, but Bane is fully dedicated to his course and is one of the few Batman villains that was never bound to be moved from his path.
One has to factor in that this is the guy that broke Batman nearly in half, over his knee, without anything but his own freakish strength. Granted, in the comics, he was on Venom, and in the movie he was being pumped full of painkillers, but there was nothing else going on that could have been used as an excuse. There was no special suit, no amped-up, metahuman powers. This was Bane, pure and simple, and he proved to be more than enough for Batman to handle. When Batman came back he thrashed Bane obviously, but before this, it had taken someone that qualified as a metahuman, or someone of an insane skill level, to do anything to Gotham’s dark knight. The two live-action versions of Bane have been the only time that he’s been seen in the flesh, and the version that was seen in Batman and Robin wasn’t exactly the best outing that the character was given. But in Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie he was definitely portrayed in a great way by Tom Hardy.
In fact, the only issue to comment on with the character in The Dark Knight Rises is that in the comics, Bane is huge. He dwarfs Batman most times and looks imposing enough to take on a full-grown grizzly bear without any trouble. But Hardy isn’t that big of a guy, and it does feel that CGI was completely out of the question since if Nolan used it at all then he did so sparingly since the villains in his movies were more practical than anything that had been seen up to that point. So Bane wasn’t a monstrously large individual, but he was still made to be as imposing as possible, a task that Hardy was more than suited for since his acting was great enough to make it clear that the character wasn’t someone that needed to be messed with. It might have been nice to get someone bigger who could have towered over Christian Bale’s Batman, perhaps someone like Nathan Jones, who is an actual monster of a man given that he’s absolutely huge. The only problem is that next to Hardy, Jones isn’t really that great of an actor, at least not for something that was made by Nolan.
Bane was given to the right actor without question, despite his lack of size. And the fact that much of his face was hidden away by the mask for the entire movie wasn’t a big problem since Hardy made it work. To be honest, the mask only came up a few times throughout the movie, and he played it off in a way that made it sound as though taking it off would be more painful for the person that dared to touch it. That makes sense, as Bane would likely fly into a rage from the pain for as long as he could.
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