Based on a true story, Legend follows the tale of Reginald "Reggie" Kray and his twin brother, Ronald "Ronnie" Kray (both portrayed by all around great guy Tom Hardy).
20 (the British crime thriller debuted in the UK on Sept. The clue is in the title.If you're unfamiliar with the infamous Kray twins, you'll get to know them pretty well after watching Legend, which opens in U.S. Which all perfectly fits Helgeland’s brief: he is portraying the Krays through the prism of Frances, to whom they are larger than life. It’s a rare thing to observe: an actor creating chemistry with himself.Īt times Hardy pushes it close to comic caricature (the awful violence is almost played for laughs in earlier scenes, especially in a virtuoso Ronnie versus Reggie hardcore brawl) but he balances on the brink as he did with such spectacular success in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson. One is more hero, one is more monster, but Hardy makes sure the lines blur. The Bane of Reggie’s existence, if you like. His Ronnie, meanwhile, is a hot, lumpy stew of nasal croaks, eye-contact avoidance and stiff, awkward body language. Into Reggie, he throws all his Eames-from-Inception charm, making him a young Brando with a wideboy swagger. Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers did well back in Medak’s movie, but comparing them to Hardy is like holding up a match to an exploding boozer. But like ’60s London itself, the film is overshadowed by the double-trouble presence of Tom Hardy as both Ronnie and Reggie. Through her eyes they are heroes and monsters.īrowning is excellent, simultaneously brittle and warm, though her deliberately quaint voiceover grates at times. Then, inevitably, the filthy, gruesome true nature of her husband and brother-in-law is gradually exposed. Frances is swept up in all the glitz of their thrall over the East End.
She is wary of Ronnie, a hulking bottled storm with genuine psychological problems, but still with his own quirky charisma, wrapped up in the fact that he’s an open homosexual. She loves Reggie fiercely, so at first he is portrayed as a twinkle-eyed, cheekie-chappie, drainpipe-climbing scoundrel. He makes Reggie’s delicate, doomed girlfriend-then-wife Frances (Emily Browning) our guide to the Krays’ world. Helgeland takes a more interesting approach.
Become too enamoured, and you’ve made heroes of monsters.īack in 1990’s The Krays, director Peter Medak strove to explain-not-excuse the twins via a full-on biopic which laid the blame at a perhaps too-easy target: their mum. Get too judgmental and moral, and you deny them their charm, which was as important to their rise as their brutality. They are, as writer-director Brian Helgeland would evidently agree, prickly subjects. Like Al Capone a generation before and an ocean away, they accrued a glamour that obscured their atrocities, and for some still does. The identical twin crimelords may have been violent thugs and, eventually, convicted murderers, but during their rise they rubbed shoulders with the rich, famous and powerful, and encouraged a ‘they look after their own’ street-mythology that endures to this day. Like it or not - and it’s certainly not something to be celebrated - Ronnie and Reggie Kray were as much ’60s Brit icons as The Beatles, Michael Caine or Twiggy.