The Krays were probably amazing guys - horrible and violent, but at the very least fascinating - but none of their magnetism comes across here. That opening was already a cliche in the black-and-white days. You know, we’ve heard the myths, but now we’re going to get the real deal.
But then, it’s always a bad sign when the first thing a narrator says is that she’s going to tell us the true story. Helgeland actually has Frances do the voice-over narration, an idea that doesn’t seem wise at the start and becomes even worse before the finish. It would be like expecting Kay to do most of the heavy lifting in “The Godfather.”
LEGEND TOM HARDY STREAMING MOVIE
That’s neither whom the movie is about nor what it’s about. But you can’t build a movie about twin gangsters around a woman who is in love with one of them and who really does nothing but sit and wait for her man to come home.
Helgeland attempts to locate the movie’s heart and purpose in the relationship between Reggie and the woman in his life, Frances (Emily Browning), a delicate flower of London’s East End, who enters into the relationship with a painful mix of hope and dread. It’s just scenes, taking place over the course of time, sometimes one following another with an almost random connection. No one is faced with a moral dilemma or a hard choice, and no one has a goal he’s moving toward. At no point is the audience made to wonder how things will turn out. At no point does the movie make the audience worry about something or look forward to seeing something. Individual scenes have flair and tension, but as an overall structure, the film is odd - not innovative, not unconventional, but simply off.įor example, the Krays have no overarching project. Confidential,” “42” and other films, wrote and directed “Legend,” so it comes as a surprise that the screenplay is the movie’s great weakness.
To be fair, Hardy deserves praise for suggesting an entirely different essence as Ronnie, but he turns Ronnie into a caricature, a borderline comic figure, which in this case undercuts the drama.īrian Helgeland, the respected screenwriter of “L.A. Though the movie may have been designed as a tour de force showcase, Hardy is at his best only when playing Reggie, whose life is complicated by having Caligula for a brother. The twin performances, with Hardy often sharing the frame with himself, are seamless from a technical standpoint, and yet there is something about watching Hardy acting with Hardy that seems off - something wrong in the timing, something calculated in the body movements, something missing in an interaction that is really no interaction at all. Tom Hardy plays both Kray brothers - Reggie, the handsome, heterosexual brother with a head for business, and Ronnie, the heavy-set, paranoid-schizophrenic gay brother, who was dangerous and irrational.