Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy in Batman Rises!

By Corey Schroeder

Several news sources are reporting that not only will Anne Hathaway (you might remember her from “The Princess Diaries,” “Brokeback Mountain,” or her magnificent bosoms from “Havoc”) play Selina Kyle, or Catwoman for the uninitiated, in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” but Tom Hardy (“Bronson” and recently of “Inception”) will play the brainy brawler Bane.

Bane, some of you will sadly remember, was a near-mute, grunting bruiser from the atrocious “Batman & Robin.” As far as the rest of the movie, this was actually a fairly minor thing to get wrong, but if you’re familiar with the character, the thing that makes him such an effective villain is that he’s a brilliant tactician as well as fairly intelligent in his own right.


Also: he broke Batman’s spine over his knee after wearing him out by blowing up a wall of Arkham Asylum with a rocket launcher. So subtlety is not his strong suit but in the hands of Christopher Nolan and being played by an actual actor, it sounds like he might be able to be the primary villain of this picture. And for those who doubt Hardy's ability to play the bulked-up badass, may I present exhibit A:

As for Hathaway as Kyle, it’s going to be interesting to see if the movie starts her out as mild-mannered Selina and then transform her into Catwoman, or if she’ll already have a career in theft. Or what she’ll be before, for that matter, as Frank Miller retooled the character as already in a career in crime. Either way, I think she’ll be able to bring a certain innocence to the character of Selina and playful badassery to Catwoman.