Reggie’s candor is one of his few endearing characteristics.
His happy astonishment when Reggie matter-of-factly announces that he is a homosexual -one of the twists in the tale - provides a lighter moment. (Chazz Palminteri) to add a little Mafia colour to the mix. There’s a lot familiar here as well: Helgeland quotes extensively from the many gangster movies that came before (when Reggie takes Francis to a nightclub for a date, the long tracking shot is a tribute to Martin Scorsese’s bravura original in Goodfellas), and there’s even an emissary from the U.S. As in many stories about British malfeasance, politicians are dragged into the story: what would an English crime tale be without some MPs getting caught with their hands in the till? Legend follows the Kray career from small-time hoods to the rulers of London underworld, but it’s something of a tangled course in which competitors are thrown in and summarily bashed in the head, stabbed to death or otherwise dispatched in gruesome manner. The Krays are set up against an earnest cop named Nipper Read (Christopher Ecclestone) who is not half as interesting: the good guys in these films are always a step behind, sort of gangsters manqués who don’t have the killer instinct, or the freedom, to compete. The story is told by Francis Shea (Emily Browning), a neighbourhood woman who was seduced by Reggie’s little-boy charms, not to mention those shoulders, and through her eyes we see moral quagmire into which gangster films drop us: we admire the bad guys, and then, after being forced to watch a hurricane of bloody violence, have to reconsider both the bad guys and the admiration. Confidential, which featured Russell Crowe as another of life’s winning brutes - and the re-creation of the nightclubs of swinging London, the cool cars and ring-a-ding casinos give Legend the sheen of authenticity. It was directed by Brian Helgeland - who honed his gangster skills as the writer of L.A.
THE LEGEND TOM HARDY DVD MOVIE
Whatever the reason, the movie looks pretty good. Why bother with a Krays film now, 60 years later? Like Black Mass, the recent Johnny Depp film about Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, it feels beside the point.
The story of the Krays has been told before (Legend is based on a book about the twins by John Pearson), and aside from the eccentric details, it doesn’t add much to gangster lore. It also allows us to appreciate Hardy’s skill as a creator of screen characters: Ronnie’s frightening squint, for instance, or Reggie’s aggressive walk forward into the West End London neighborhoods he rules, the cordial underworld chief greeting his public with just the slightest hint, in the carriage of his shoulders, of his taste for violence.Īside from all that - and it’s not inconsiderable - there doesn’t seem to be much point to Legend. Unlike other twin stories, like Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, Legend benefits from technical advances that allow the Krays to appear in the same frame, and even have fistfights with one another. It’s a study in performance, helped along by today’s computer technology. Otherwise, you might have to go out and rent, say, Bronson (Hardy as a - hmm - psychopathic thug) or The Drop (Hardy as psychopathic thug disguised as mild-mannered bartender), and then Locke (Hardy as a building contractor trying to help an old girlfriend) to get a sense of what this man can do. Hardy plays both of them, turning Legend into a showcase for his acting skills and a neatly packaged compendium of his range. They were Ronnie and Reggie Kray, a couple of mismatched twins: Reggie was one of those charming sociopaths who parlayed his good looks, taste for violence, and relentless greed into a charismatic persona that represents all we love and admire about movie gangsters, while Ronnie was a goggle-eyed psychopath, a schizophrenic thug whose sadistic unpredictability gives Legend what passes for comic relief.
Fans of the English actor Tom Hardy - and we are a growing cohort - will be delighted with Legend, an otherwise marginal gangster movie about a couple of British thugs who made a big splash in London in the 1960s.
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