@Mr.333:
Hey Don't Blame me, blame Joel Schumacher. It's as Robby said, The 1997 Batman & Robin film made Bane a mindless brute who did nothing more than flex and grunt occasionally, which (unfortunately) was also the first time that I was introduced to Bane, and thus was my initial (wrong but initial) impression of the character.
And it seemed that from then on, other television shows and video games only added to that initial impression, always playing up on his strength, and never the intelligence he originally had in the beginning.
It just comes off as hysterically hypocritical of you when you're sitting here admitting you were bitching about Bane without having read ANY of the comics he was in, after making a post like this:
@Mr.333:
I swear, do Hollywood executives even read the comics they're adapting? I can't believe that, rather than giving fresh, interesting, and complex villains at chance to be brought into the spotlight, they instead opt to hash out the same villains for iconicity's sake. That's when a series starts to go downhill.
When a simple Wikipedia or DC Wikia search on Bane would have lead you to find out everything about the character. Hell, one of the leading lines on Wikipedia's entry for him is "Bane has been one of Batman's most intelligent and physically powerful foes." And the DC Wikia mentions the fact that Ra's Al Ghul said Bane was one of, if not the most intelligent men in the DC Universe.
As for other Media portrayals of Bane, Batman and Robin got it laughably bad, but Arkham Asylum barely had any dialog with him.
The Animated Series got it right. They didn't play up his intelligence Enough but they did make him a calm calculating Motherfucker. He doesn't start out going after Batman, he tells Thorne he's going to follow Killer Croc. Thorn was confused, and Bane told him "The Batman will surely be on the Croc's trail. I will observe the Bat in Action, and when I understand how he thinks and fights, I will break him!"
He wasn't just a bruiser who went straight after Batman, he actually thought about how he was going to take him down. That's more to say about Croc, whose usual Grand-master plan to take out Batman in that show was "I Threw a Rock at him!"
Well, at least it was a Big Rock…