Legend Review

A Legend in Their Own Minds

♦ Tripwire gave editor-in-chief Joel Meadows the task of reviewing Brian Helgeland’s Krays biopic Legend, out on DVD and Blu Ray now and starring Tom Hardy, Emily Browning and Taron Egerton

Legend

Director: Brian Helgeland

Stars: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning and Taron Egerton

Hollywood has been obsessed with gangsters since the days of Jimmy Cagney and the 1930s. It seems that a year doesn’t go by without a gangster film at the cinema. The story of the Krays, East London’s vicious gangster brothers, has already been told on the big screen in Philip Medak’s 1990 movie The Krays. So now Brian Helgeland, an American writer/ director with a decent pedigree, has decided to try and tackle the subject matter. In what seemed like a bravado move, he cast Tom Hardy as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray. However, Legend suffers from a multitude of problems. Hardy is very good as the less psychotic of the twins, Reggie, but he plays Ronnie like a cartoon character. The other flaw here is that Helgeland really doesn’t know how to maintain the drama and doesn’t really understand the milieu the story is set in. The Krays wasn’t perfect either but it held together a little better.  Legend has attempted to contextualise things with the inclusion of figures like Lord Boothby as corrupt aristocrat and the token presence of rival gangster Charlie Richardson (Paul Bettany) but it is just a thin veneer. The real problem is that regardless of how ruthless they were, they were inherently kitsch and so they don’t have the human complexity to create a compelling and interesting tale on the screen. I struggled to write a review here because there is such little depth to the film.

JOEL MEADOWS

Legend www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

Legend [DVD]