It was there.
to elaborate, the visit was just a ruse to gain access into the hospital, and after the doctor listed his maladies, he rappelled out the window into gordon’s room to ask about the underground army.
which leads me to wonder just how crippled was wayne at the start of the movie?
The doctor was played by Thomas Lennon of “Reno 911!” and “The State,” by the way. I’d say the injuries were real. We saw Bruce create a leg brace for himself later in the movie, and while I thought early on that he might be exaggerating the injury and using the cane as a prop, he was shunning human contact, so nobody but Alfred would have seen it. I think only he could only allow himself to acknowledge the injury when he was retired from being Batman. When he went back to work I think Bruce stopped using the cane.
He couldn’t have been faking the injuries because:
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Selina was able to knock him down by kicking his cane out from under him.
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The aforementioned scene where a doctor goes over all the injuries to his leg.
He used an exoskeleton to get his leg back into shape. Whether he had that for the rest of movie or just until his leg healed fully is up for debate (I find it hard to believe he had an exoskeleton in the pit prison all those months but maybe).
This is his speech:
There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth… Hope. Every man who has ventured here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy… So simple… Many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope. So, as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clamoring over each other to “stay in the sun.” You can watch me torture an entire city and when you have truly understood the depth of your failure, we will fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s destiny… We will destroy Gotham and then, when it is done and Gotham is ashes, then you have my permission to die.
Some minor notes.
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I loved the casting. Most has been covered here, but when I saw the indecisive cop holding the megaphone on the other side of the bridge was played by Bob Marley (no relation) I almost bust a gut laughing. Anne Hathaway knocked Catwoman out of the park, as well, especially the transition scene where she first appears as a maid.
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Hardy as Bane was an inspired choice, but early on his voice came out as a mock-british thing that really turned me off the first CIA scene entirely. (Though it’s good to see Aidan Gillen getting work.) I wish he could have been a bit more exaggerated physically, though, or used his breathing apparatus as a 'roid delivery system instead of painkillers. As it was, especially in the mob fight at the end, he seemed more like a competent brawler among amateurs rather than an almost-literal titan.
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Nice bait-and-switch on the Bane/Talia reveal. I’d just replayed Arkham City during my sick leave, so I even had it fresh in mind that Ra’s al Ghul had a daughter, not a son. But I still bought it, thinking they’d abbreviated the Talia character into Bane to keep the namedropping low.
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JGL was a very competent straight man for the movie, but took too much time.
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I really, really want a director’s cut of this movie. Or, possibly considering how much credit Nolan has with Hollywood these days, I want an editor’s cut. A third of the Pit, more Caine, more Batman, less Bruce Wayne.
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The soundtrack and audio design was brilliant. I feel sorry for the people who’ve experienced technical difficulties.
Sorry for the double post, but I also thought of something with a bit more substance.
I think the reason for the convoluted five-month plot has to do with what Ra’s al Ghul said in the first movie; that they’d tried an economic attack on Gotham, but the actions of Thomas Wayne had galvanized the city into manning up and doing some decent things. I think Bane and Talia fear the same thing would happen to the world if they just straight-out nuked the city from a distance. They don’t just want to wipe Gotham off the map, they want the world to see it as putting a frothing dog out of its’ misery instead of hammering down the tallest nail. Obviously the Dent Act had again galvanized the city, so if they just pulled the trigger they would be counteracting their own agenda. Killing Gotham on a high note, as it were. Finding out that Dent was in fact a villain, through Gordon’s notes, was a real cherry for them.
I think you saw DKR waaaaay too many times…
and you forgot the dramatic pause between “ashes” and “then”…
Yeah, Nolan has already said there won’t be any deleted scenes on the DVD, so definitely no director’s cut.
I’m still not fully convinced one way or the other on the injury. Yes, catwoman knocked his cane out but a few days later he’s rappelling out windows? He walks in and out of the charity ball with a cane but he dances with catwoman without the cane? Then in the pit his freakin’ vertebrae was poking through the skin, but his leg is fine? It just seemed like a weird and inconsistent plot device.
Also, bane’s speech doesn’t really explain WHY he wants to destroy gotham - just how. Even if the people do degenerate into anarchy, would the world really think “wow, that lot deserves it.” or would they think “wow, what a convoluted and shitty way to die. wtf is wrong with this ‘Bane’ and his ‘league of shadows’ ?”
Plus I don’t think Nolan does a very good job of showing the degeneration. I think the message of “everyone is corruptable” would be clearer if say, the coward-turned-hero cop was the exile judge instead of scarecrow. As it stands now it just seems to confirm what everyone already knows - the people in Arkham deserved to be in there, dent act or not.
Double plus… wtf is the city doing with a prison ON the island?! Billions of dollars worth of real estate just to house some criminals? Absurdity.
Saw it yesterday and loved it.
Kind of felt sorry for Bane at the end. Talia was the true villain and he was just devoutly loyal to her.
Bane didn’t have to explain why he wanted to destroy Gotham. That was explained in Batman Begins. The League of Shadows destroys the most powerful city in the world to “reset” civilization. Crazy but that was what they do. Talia wanted to continue their work and Bane loved Talia.
Is it me or does Gotham City have the world’s shittiest detectives? Seriously, Gordon just figures out at the end of the movie that Batman is Bruce Wayne? I’d thought he’d known all along and just been polite about it! Nobody seriously noticed that all the criminals got Batman’s nice toys by breaking into a Wayne Industries vault? Where the everloving fuck does anybody think he gets all those wonderful toys? Can nobody put one and one together to make two? (Two and two is higher math by GCPD standards, evidently.)
ETA - oh, don’t forget to ask Brucie to tell his “friend”, nod nod wink wink, that we’re throwing a birthday party for Batman today and we got him a nice cake.
In Batman begins, it was said that Gotham was beyond saving and must be cleansed. Batman came to be because he believed that Gotham wasn’t irredeemable. By TKR, Gotham is pretty well off, devoid of crime. In fact, the only real crime is introduced by Bane himself.
Or GPD.
In the Nolanverse, it’s understandable if you’re not sure. 
i thought the same thing. Great Daryl Hammond impression.
Bane was much bigger than hardy was in warrior. He was cut but not big. If that was him the whole time I suspect some pharmaceutical help.
Any one notice that even though Nolan made the choice to not mention the Joker out of respect for Ledger he cast Matthew Modine who played Joker in Full Metal Jacket.
Also, Wayne Enterprises goes under due to some really awful trades the day after the stock exchange is broken into by masked dudes who hacked the server in full view of hundreds of people. And somehow nobody connects the two events.
I also enjoyed the implication that Batman spent hours setting up his big light show on the bridge and then sat there for thirty minutes, waiting for Gordon and his buddies to walk halfway out onto the ice (convinced that they could die at any moment) before announcing his presence. I sort of wish they would’ve really hammered home the superdickery by having Batman stride off after Gordon lights the flaming bat-signal, leaving the commissioner stranded in the middle of the ice. “My work here is done! Away!”
In-freaking-sane is what it is. The idea that a small army of super-ninjas exist somewhere in the far east for thousands of years, whose sole purpose is to periodically destroy civilization when it gets too “corrupt” – and they skipped the Spanish empire, the British empire, the original gilded age, the Bolsheviks, the rise of the Nazis, and finally show up in the US today because – I don’t know, because the top marginal tax rate dropped below 39%?
And 2000 years ago you could “reset” western civilization by letting Rome fall – which RAG claimed credit for – but today New York (which clearly Gotham, in this movie, is a stand-in for) is no more important to the survival of civilization than London, Tokyo, Berlin, Beijing, Washington, or any combination of various big cities in the world.
Whatever happened to villains wanting money/power? Are filmmakers concerned that the audience will identify too much with that?
That also bothered me. Yes, they got the fake fingerprints and all that stuff, but you’d think trading might be stopped, that a huge move like that would get a second look, and that Bruce could have easily made a believable complaint about it.