Brian Helgeland’s Legend is an incomplete study of the Kray twins, who ran their illegal criminal enterprise from London’s East End neighbourhood in the 1950s and ’60s. The Krays were equally violent and both reportedly bisexual, but in the interests of plotting, Helgeland draws the identical twins (played by Tom Hardy) differently: Ronnie is a bespectacled paranoid schizophrenic, openly gay, psychotic and destructive, while Reggie is a pragmatic and very straight romantic whose relationship with Frances (Emily Browning) is as conventional as a cuppa tea.
The biopic is based on John Pearson’s non-fiction book The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, and is set in the decades during which the twins clobbered their way to the top of the underworld through menace and sheer swagger. As the twins rise in influence and take over various rackets, their differences threaten to pull them apart. Ronnie’s intransigence extends from abusing Frances in a fit of childish jealousy (promoting a slug-fest with his brother that is one of the movie’s highlights) to making questionable business decisions that threaten to demolish the empire that Reggie has carefully built. Frances comes undone by the unrelenting pressure of being married to the mob, and Helgeland devotes considerable screen time to her increasingly frayed interactions with Reggie, who knows that his brother has tipped over the edge but is powerless to break family ties.
The phalanx of supporting characters include Taron Egerton (Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service) as Ronnie’s slavish and equally psychotic lover, Christopher Eccleston as the hard-working Scotland Yard detective who tries to trip up the twins, David Thewlis as the Krays’ hapless business manager, and Paul Anderson as Reggie’s bag man. Chazz Palminteri, who has played his share of mobsters over his career, shows up as America gangster Meyer Lansky’s man in London, who tells Reggie that his biggest liability is his brother.
Cast in the right mould
Tom Hardy towers over the rest of the cast. The burly actor with the sensitive face commands the same kind of attention he got in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008), and many of the movie’s ultraviolent scenes have a similarly uneasy mix of horror and humour. With nods to Martin Scorsese and Guy Ritchie, Legend is flash fun. Beautifully shot by Dick Pope, the movie glamourises the Kray twins without making too much of their place in popular culture (their clubs were hangouts for wealthy folks who were thrilled to bits at hanging out with hoods). The examination of what made them legends apart from their bloodthirstiness isn’t exactly strong. Strangely, even though the movie unfolds over several years, nobody ages.
The focus on the inner world of the Krays and their cohorts excludes any awareness of what else was going on in London at that point, but as a platform for the talented cast, especially Hardy, the movie works just fine. Helgeland’s screenplay is packed with sharp one-liners and repartee, including Ronnie’s observation that he is a “giver and not a receiver” when he is describing the kind of gay man he is, and Thewlis’s resigned comment that the gang needs “a public relations department and we have Joseph Goebbels”.
Goebbels is, in this case, Ronnie, played by Hardy with a clenched jaw and a volcanic temperament. (The East End accent sorely needs subtitles that are missing from the Indian release.) Despite their differences, the brothers prove to be indistinguishable from one other. Ronnie has a prescription to certify his insanity, but Reggie, who brutally stabs a man to death at a Christmas party, has only himself to blame.
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The biopic is based on John Pearson’s non-fiction book The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, and is set in the decades during which the twins clobbered their way to the top of the underworld through menace and sheer swagger. As the twins rise in influence and take over various rackets, their differences threaten to pull them apart. Ronnie’s intransigence extends from abusing Frances in a fit of childish jealousy (promoting a slug-fest with his brother that is one of the movie’s highlights) to making questionable business decisions that threaten to demolish the empire that Reggie has carefully built. Frances comes undone by the unrelenting pressure of being married to the mob, and Helgeland devotes considerable screen time to her increasingly frayed interactions with Reggie, who knows that his brother has tipped over the edge but is powerless to break family ties.
The phalanx of supporting characters include Taron Egerton (Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service) as Ronnie’s slavish and equally psychotic lover, Christopher Eccleston as the hard-working Scotland Yard detective who tries to trip up the twins, David Thewlis as the Krays’ hapless business manager, and Paul Anderson as Reggie’s bag man. Chazz Palminteri, who has played his share of mobsters over his career, shows up as America gangster Meyer Lansky’s man in London, who tells Reggie that his biggest liability is his brother.
Cast in the right mould
Tom Hardy towers over the rest of the cast. The burly actor with the sensitive face commands the same kind of attention he got in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008), and many of the movie’s ultraviolent scenes have a similarly uneasy mix of horror and humour. With nods to Martin Scorsese and Guy Ritchie, Legend is flash fun. Beautifully shot by Dick Pope, the movie glamourises the Kray twins without making too much of their place in popular culture (their clubs were hangouts for wealthy folks who were thrilled to bits at hanging out with hoods). The examination of what made them legends apart from their bloodthirstiness isn’t exactly strong. Strangely, even though the movie unfolds over several years, nobody ages.
The focus on the inner world of the Krays and their cohorts excludes any awareness of what else was going on in London at that point, but as a platform for the talented cast, especially Hardy, the movie works just fine. Helgeland’s screenplay is packed with sharp one-liners and repartee, including Ronnie’s observation that he is a “giver and not a receiver” when he is describing the kind of gay man he is, and Thewlis’s resigned comment that the gang needs “a public relations department and we have Joseph Goebbels”.
Goebbels is, in this case, Ronnie, played by Hardy with a clenched jaw and a volcanic temperament. (The East End accent sorely needs subtitles that are missing from the Indian release.) Despite their differences, the brothers prove to be indistinguishable from one other. Ronnie has a prescription to certify his insanity, but Reggie, who brutally stabs a man to death at a Christmas party, has only himself to blame.