When it comes to the excellent lead performance that anchors Legend, you can never have too much of a good thing. Spying Tom Hardy (London Road) in almost every frame of the film isn’t just a treat for established fans, nor simply a testament to his talents, but a storytelling necessity for this biopic. Here, the actor largely seen recently behind the wheel in features such as Locke and Mad Max: Fury Road inhabits twin protagonists: infamous thugs Reggie and Ronnie Kray.
As set in the 1960s and narrated by Frances Shea (Emily Browning, Pompeii), the woman who would become Reggie’s unhappy wife, the Krays’ tale spans the more grounded and rational brother’s attempts to assuage his counterpart’s unhinged tendencies as they endeavour to rule the criminal element of London’s East End. Extreme violence characterises their lives, whether taking on enemy turf, trying to work their through schemes and amass an empire of clubs and cash, or clashing over personal differences — particularly Frances’ urgings that Reggie gives up his notorious lifestyle for an honest future.
Hardy steps into the skin of the siblings, one smooth and charismatic, the other sometimes cruel and confrontational, and neither sharing much in common beyond their bond of blood, almost identical appearance, and shared fondness for the unseemly underworld they’re striving to control. From the moment he does so, he offers up astonishingly distinctive, textured, complex and often conflicting portrayals that range far beyond the separate but intertwined narratives the two men traversed, and cast any thoughts of the technical trickery required to achieve such a feat well out of the audience’s mind. Flitting between calm and unhinged, suave and playful, traditional and eccentric often within the same frame, his resourceful efforts flesh out emotionally and intellectually individual characters. Each is physically and vocally unique, as well as utterly engaging from the feature’s commencement until its finish.
His accomplishment, as strong a showcase for his versatility as his resume littered with the likes of Bronson and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and standing out over the much smaller turns by co-stars such as Christopher Eccleston (TV’s The Leftovers), Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service) and David Thewlis (Macbeth), is crucial to Legend. Much of what surrounds his compelling centrepiece aspires to be adequate — and this isn’t the first time the realm of entertainment has dallied with the notorious crime kingpins (as previously played by Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame in 1990’s The Krays), nor is their rise-and-fall story rare when it comes to big screen accounts of both fictional and real-life gangster stories.
With a pedigree scribing L.A. Confidential, Mystic River and Man on Fire, this isn’t writer/director Brian Helgeland’s maiden voyage through such territory either, though his workmanlike helming does little to highlight that previous experience. Instead, in adapting the book The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins by John Pearson, he remains dutiful — to details many might already know, to genre convention and to his leading man. In his hands, the largely upbeat Legend offers glossy period visuals via cinematographer Dick Pope (Mr. Turner), a sense of pace that helps mask the feature’s 131-minute running time courtesy of editor Peter McNulty (RoboCop), and a balance of the brutish and externalised versus the sensitive and internalised that all adds up to an acceptable, engrossing true crime offering. With Hardy’s assistance though, the film flirts with becoming something more; however that his contribution provides the movie’s peak is never in question.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Legend
Director: Brian Helgeland
UK/France, 2015, 131 mins
Release date: 15 October
Distributor: StudioCanal
Rated: MA
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