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Tom Hardy plays with himself in Legend |
Director: Brian Helgeland
Cast: Tom Hardy (Ronnie Kray/Reggie Kray), Emily Browning
(Frances Shea), Christopher Eccleston (Superintendent Leonard “Nipper” Read),
David Thewlis (Leslie Payne), Taron Egerton (Edward “Mad Teddy” Smith), Chazz Palminteri
(Angelo Bruno), Paul Bettany (Charlie Richardson), Colin Morgan (Frankie Shea),
Tara Fitzgerald (Mrs Shea), Paul Anderson (Albert Donoghue), Sam Spruell (Jack
McVitie), John Sessions (Lord Boothby), Kevin McNally (Harold Wilson)
Tom Hardy is the sort of actor who, if you could find a role
for him in your film, you certainly would. So how about getting the chance to
cast him twice? That’s the happy situation Brian Helgeland was in here, with
the chance for Hardy to play not one but both of the Kray twins. The buzz
around Hardy taking on both roles was so strong that the film itself was almost
completely forgotten in the crush. This was perhaps easy to do since the film is
pretty mediocre at best, a confused mess that can’t decide if it wants to
wallow in the undeserved glamour of the Krays or whether it wants to explore
the darker currents below the surface.
The film covers most of the career of the Kray brothers –
the seemingly more grounded, ambitious Reggie and then the more impulsive
Ronnie, recently released from psychiatric prison. The Kray brothers balance
competing demands: Ronnie is essentially happy where he is, king of a small
pond, while Reggie has dreams of expanding a criminal empire across the
Atlantic in partnership with the Mafia. Meanwhile, various gangland opponents
and the police stalk the brothers, while Reggie’s relationship and later
marriage to Frances Shea (Emily Browning) slowly collapses.
Helgeland’s film is a fairly bland piece of film-making that
wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to enjoy the criminal undertakings
of the Krays, their clubland cool, charisma and charm. But it also wants to
make clear that these are violent criminals who have very few moral qualms about
anything they do. It’s a printing and an exploration of the legend, but the
problem is that it never actually becomes particularly interesting, despite the
best efforts of everyone involved. Perhaps everyone became too blinded by the
pyrotechnics and undoubted skill of Hardy’s double performance that the overall
film itself got a bit lost.
Hardy is superb, turning the brothers into two highly
distinctive personalities who both seem like two halves of the same shattered
personality, whose character traits slowly merge and even swap over the course
of the film. Hardy also develops a key physicality and style for both
characters that is very similar but also clearly different in both cases. So
you get Ronnie, Churchill-bulldog like, with a muscular, growling heaviness
that stinks of paranoia. And Reggie, smart-suited and slicked back, with a
confident thrusting demeanour that falls apart over the film into a weasily
fury.
Both these progressions make perfect sense, and Hardy is so
skilled at playing both halves of many conversations that you forget while
watching the film that you are looking at one actor playing two roles.
Astonishingly – and perhaps the biggest trick he pulls – he turns this
tour-de-force double role into something that feels so natural you don’t notice
it happening. And the bond that ties the two brothers together into a descent
into hell is so strong that even when beating the crap out of each other they
still seem like two halves of one messed up personality.
Hardy is of course so brilliant, the rest of the skilled
cast basically only get a few beats to sketch out various gangland figures and
coppers. Excellent actors – Eccleston, Thewlis, Bettany, Anderson – are picked
out to do this, but none make much of an impression. The thrust is always the
strange dance of personality between the Krays, two brothers who effectively
destroy each other with their actions, but are so closely bound together that
the one cannot survive without the other.
It’s psychology like this that you wish the film could
explore, especially as Hardy takes both brothers to dark and bitter places that
makes both of them openly vile and terrifying to imagine meeting. Helgeland
chooses to explore much of this – particularly Reggie’s darkness – through a
rather tired voiceover led structure via Emily Browning’s Frances Shea. There
is nothing wrong with Browning’s performance, but the predictable and rather
traditional structure that this gives the story – not to mention the rather
clumsy scripting – ends up dragging the film along.
Helgeland makes a decent job of directing this film, and it
looks fine, but it is strangely underpowered and unengaging at every turn, a
bland piece of gangland history that only really catches fire when both Hardys
take the stage and this superstar actor lets rip. Away from him, there is a
soft-focus nostalgia in its look back at the sixties, which confuses the
attitude the film has towards the Krays, and a ticking off of historical events
that gets in the way of creating a compelling narrative.
Hardy overshadows the film and he deserves to as he is more
or less the only reason to watch it.
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