Legend finds Tom Hardy playing two lead roles: twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ruled gangland London with an iron fist and brass knuckles in the 1960s.
Yet while Hardy is one of the finest actors working today, he fails to deliver a pair of great performances, his Reg believably tough and witty but his Ron so over-the-top that he enters the realm of caricature and comes close to railroading the whole endeavour.
Written and directed by Brian Helgeland – who scripted LA Confidential and directed Payback, A Knight’s Tale and 42 – the film kicks off with the line “London in the 1960s… everyone had a story about the Krays.” Trouble is, Helgeland doesn’t seem sure what story he wants to tell, the screenplay switching abruptly from crime-drama to romance to morality tale and back again.
Ronnie and Reggie’s mum – so big an influence on the pair – barely gets a look-in, though maybe that’s to help set the film apart from acclaimed 1990 film The Krays in which she played so large a role. Instead Reggie’s young bride Frances Shea dominates proceedings, lending the film a poetic narration that seems somewhat out-of-place, and passing judgement on events when her opinion oftentimes seems irrelevant.
Ignoring their childhood and early boxing exploits, the film jumps into the story when the boys are nearing the height of their powers, overseeing crime in East London and working their way into the West End’s clubland via violence, extortion, and the most hostile of takeovers.
Reg was a classic East End gangster, quick with a line and tasty with his fists, but Ron was the more dangerous of the twins, the film variously describing him as violent, paranoid and schizophrenic. Together, however, they became respected, feared, and in a strange way adored by the British public thanks to the fact that the only fought their own, seemingly kept the street safe, and resisted what was perceived as a corrupt police force.
But the Krays didn’t have it all their own way, with the Richardson gang south of the river going after similar territory, and so the film’s early scenes juxtapose turf war with Reggie’s wooing of Frances (Emily Browning).
A mere 16-years-old when she met Reggie, Frances was bowled over by his charm and charisma as well as the glitz and glamour of his lifestyle, illustrated via a single, Goodfellas-esque Steadicam shot in which Reg escorts Frances through one of their many nightclubs.
They eventually married, but Frances was a fragile soul, ill-equipped to deal with the dark side of her husband’s chosen career, and her story ended in tragedy. The relationship taking centre stage is doubtlessly designed to give us better insight into the brothers, but the film frustratingly fails to get under the skin of either Ron or Reg.
There’s little doubt that Ronnie did and said some strange things, with his plans to build a utopia in Nigeria coming under particular scrutiny, and the film portraying him as using his homosexuality as a weapon. But too often it’s played for laughs, Helgeland giving Ron a few too many punchlines and Hardy playing him as a wide-eyed, Eric Morecombe-esque figure of fun when first-hand accounts suggest that the reality was much more terrifying.
Frances (Emily Browning) and Reggie (Tom Hardy).
Reggie meanwhile, comes across as a noble gent torn between troubled wife and insane brother. But he was a (very) big boy capable of making his own decisions. Hardy nails the characterization, so-much-so that it’s frequently impossible to take your eyes off his magnetic presence, but at times it feels like the film throws a little too much sympathy Reg’s way.
If the first half of the film revolves around the Krays’ rise – seeing off the threat of the Richardsons, setting up deals with the Vegas mob, and even rubbing shoulders with politicians who made them, briefly, untouchable – the second half concerns the collapse of their empire.
Violence permeates proceedings, a stand-out sequence being a bloody pub brawl in which the twins bruise and batter their opponents with a variety of tools. It’s violence that ultimately leads to their downfall however, the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie presented in gory – if not always accurate – detail.
But while Ronnie could plead insanity, one never gets a sense of what drove Reggie to such extreme acts of aggression, with Legend suggesting that Frances’s death somehow motivated his final, heinous crime when there’s little evidence to suggest that’s the case.
It makes for a muddled final third that lacks insight and focus, but is rescued by impressive performances from some of Britain’s finest character actors. David Thewlis is electric as Leslie Payne, the Kray’s fronter and fixer and one of the few men who wasn’t afraid of Ronnie. Christopher Eccleston is predictably intense as Nipper Reed, the copper who pursued the twins with obsessive compulsion. And John Sessions delivers a wicked turn as “perverted peer” Lord Boothby, delivering his lines with camp Carry-On aplomb.
Credit should also go to the effects team for so seamlessly pitting Hardy against Hardy, most notably during a visual tour de force in which Ronnie fights Reggie and try as you might, you can’t see the joins.
The same can’t be said for the way in which swinging ‘60s London is brought to life however, with scenes too often looking like they’ve been shot on soundstages or in front of green-screens. And while Duffy sounds great singing torch songs in the film’s club scenes, the score itself – by composer Carter Burwell – is horribly intrusive and reminiscent of the theme from a bad 1980s cop show.
As for Helgeland, the screenwriter-turned-director actually helms with more skill than he writes on this occasion, the dialogue too often sounding like a polished screenplay rather than words that East End characters would actually say.
But the story itself is never less than gripping, and Helgeland soaks proceedings in a stylish American sheen that heightens the reality and sets it apart from other British gangster films. The result is far from the definitive Krays movie, but one that will make a fine companion piece to the 1990 biopic.
