There really ought to be an award for mumble-mouthed acting.
Making yourself almost-understood is an art form, and Tom Hardy excels at it. Look at his backwoods Virginia brogue in Lawless, his masked Bane in Batman Dark Knight and, masked again, his Mad Max from earlier this year.
Hardy does barely-decipherable double-duty in Legend, in which he plays both of the notorious Kray brothers, gangsters who ruled London in the 1960s.
Brian Helgeland’s adaptation is the first big-screen Kray portrayal since Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp in Peter Medak’s 1990 film, The Krays. In Legend, the brothers are already the undisputed kings of London’s East End, where residents would rather “kiss a gangster” than “talk to a policeman” notes Scotland Yard’s diligent cop “Nipper” Read (Christopher Eccleston) with disgust.
Reggie (Hardy) is the sane twin: elegantly turned out, he’s no match for young Frances Shea (Emily Browning). He courts her by bringing her lemon sherbets, then flowers, then an engagement ring, presented after he climbs a drainpipe to her second-floor tenement window.
Ronnie (Hardy, redux) is the wild, unpredictable one. Let out prematurely from a mental institution — after a threat or two is leveled against the attending psychiatrist — Ronnie lives in the woods for a time and is a rumoured paranoid schizophrenic. He is openly gay despite criminal consequences, and he harbours dreams of a charitable project in Nigeria. That is, when he is not beating people to death with a claw hammer.
In fact, both brothers were indiscriminately violent and both are rumoured to have been gay, according to biographers. (“I’m not careless with the truth,” says Frances in voiceover — the veracity of the screenplay’s history, however, has been debated overseas.)
It matters little, because the most important details are here: the way the Kray brothers managed to palm much of London for a decade, their relationship with American mafia (Chazz Palminteri plays a Meyer Lansky go-between) and how they evaded persecution in part because Reggie was in bed — literally and figuratively — with high-ranking members of the House of Lords. “Aristocrats and criminals have a lot in common,” notes Frances, again in voiceover.
But the Krays’ reign is threatened by the reappearance of the Richardson gang (and a Paul Bettany cameo), the exasperation of Payne (David Thewlis), the family fixer, and by the brothers themselves. Ronnie is a liability and Reggie forgives him over and over again, even after a spectacularly messy brother-versus-brother (Hardy squared) fight scene.
Frances is presented as the third-wheel in this sibling love/bloodfest, but she is only partially drawn and her unraveling is abrupt and unconvincing. Browning (Sleeping Beauty) does the most with what is given to her. The film is a beat overlong and that damnable voiceover is completely unnecessary: the audience can follow along just fine without being leashed, like the donkey Ronnie insists on suiting up in black tie and bringing to a party.
Hardy is the reason to stay tuned. As the Krays, he crafts two different halves of the same whole with nuance and vigor, even as he stymied by aimless storytelling.Â
Legend opens Friday at International Village.
