(Clothes maketh the men rather brilliantly when it comes to distinguishing the Krays themselves: Reggie’s spiv-slick suits are tailored, finished and carried so differently from Ronnie’s more ungainly gear as to denote a different physique entirely.) Costume designer Caroline Harris, meanwhile, races through impeccably contoured, magazine-ready ensembles as recklessly as their freshly wealthy wearers presumably bought them. Dick Pope’s lensing frequently opts for comic-book extremities in its angles and compositions production designer Tom Conroy revels in mirrored, brandy-tinted surfaces and heedlessly of-the-moment interior kitsch. Helgeland has fashioned the Krays’ rearing of London’s underworld from the gutters of Whitechapel to the sequin-lined heart of Soho as a bloodily romanticized evocation of time and place not dissimilar to “Bugsy’s” from-the-ground-up chronicle of the Las Vegas Strip. While the framing is askew, the picture within is still a compelling one.
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On the more central subject of the Krays’ growing criminal empire, her point of view takes on an unconvincing omniscience in assuming equal narrative authority on their domestic and professional lives, the device winds up selling both a little short.
Despite Browning’s sympathetic efforts, Frances remains something of a cipher in the very story she’s telling, as the film dwells only cursorily on the mental and physical abuse she endured at the hands of her husband. It’s an unexpected way into the legend, but a compromised one. Played by Emily Browning, Frances is even granted the film’s guiding voiceover, narrating the Krays’ antics in disillusioned tones from the outset until, via a cruel structural fillip, her point of view is harshly stymied. Rather, it’s Frances Shea - the working-class ingenue who married Reggie in her teens before succumbing to drugs and depression - who acts as the story’s principal female agent. Where Medak’s film focused extensively on the twins’ warped relationship with their dangerously doting mother, Violet (so vividly drawn by Billie Whitelaw), she’s a peripheral presence here. It’s less satisfying as psychological profile: For all Hardy’s expressive detail and physical creativity, Helgeland’s chewy, incident-packed script offers little insight into what made either of these contrasting psychopaths tick, or finally explode. The illusion is achieved so fluidly and separably that the practicalities of the stunt are soon forgotten.Īs a performance showcase, then, “Legend” is more sensational than Peter Medak’s meaner, muddier 1990 biopic “The Krays,” which nonetheless boasted fine work from New Romantic balladeers Gary and Martin Kemp.
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That both these distinct achievements - the work of a vital movie star and a resourceful character actor, respectively - are contained within a single performance is, of course, its true marvel. His Reggie is a suave, charismatically volatile antihero calculated to inspire perverse admiration among younger male auds his playfully eccentric inhabitation of the gay, mentally unstable Ronnie would, on its own, rep the more extravagant bid for thespian kudos. Interestingly, Hardy’s own performance splits along comparable lines. In the U.S., “Legend” may viably be marketed two ways by the currently indomitable Universal: as a lavishly violent genre outing and as a more prestigious awards vehicle for its duplicated leading man. Given an enduring local fascination with the Brothers Kray, business should boom in Blighty, where the pic opens ahead of its international premiere in Toronto.