Rajorajorajo | 23 Dec 2011 | 554 Views | 0 Likes | 0 Dislikes

I Love YouTube: Batman Impressions

Besides being so thoroughly unforgettable thanks to the spectacular action sequences splashed across the enormous IMAX screen, the 6 minute prologue of The Dark Knight Rises I saw recently got me thinking about actors, the characters they play and how they choose to play them. Tom Hardy as the unintelligible Bane, to be specific...

I mean, if you break it down, there are many reasons why Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise is so successful (tone, realism, scope, cinematography, etc.) but the one that stands out the most is the spot-on casting. Every actor cast in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight seems to be so perfectly matched with their characters and as a result, their individual performances shine ever so brightly. I mean, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman... these are all titans of the craft and when they deliver lines of dialogue to a guy dressed in a rubber suit you don’t question it for a minute - they’re that good.

Lead actor Christian Bale deserves praise as well because the role of Bruce Wayne is more complex than you’d think... Deep rivers of angst and anger run beneath the shiny millionaire playboy exterior, and he telegraphs his pain and loss extraordinarily well. Great, great actor.

HOWEVER... The guy they got to play Batman is another story. He’s always been just as hard to understand as Bane seems to be in the new film... Saliva always seems to be flying out of his mouth and for some reason he seems to be channeling Dr. Claw in every line of dialogue. Whoever he is, he's phoning it in to the point that, apparently, they could have cast ANYONE in the role and we wouldn’t have noticed the difference:

The Best of the bunch!

Never invite this dude to your dinner party...

Hilarious! Sort of...

Points for the eye make-up

Probably wasn't worth the trouble of uploading...

Not bad for a first try... Don't call us, we'll call you.

At first I was all, 'less talk more rock.' And then I was all, "oh, I see what you did there."

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