Here Come the Hardys

You can see the reasoning behind Legend. In casting Tom Hardy as the identical twin brothers who ran London’s organized crime scene in the 1960s, writer-director Brian Helgeland must have felt like the movie was going to make itself. Oh, but it didn’t. Casting the right actors in a film is half the battle won, but you still have to go out and win the other half. And that’s where this would-be crime epic, which expands to Southlake this week, falls on its face.

The film is based on John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence, a biography of the Kray twins that his subjects hired him to write while they were still in prison. The movie picks up their career in the mid-1960s, as the brothers and their gang The Firm take over London’s East End, wresting control from South London’s Richardson Gang, a.k.a. the Torture Gang. Reginald Kray is the smooth-talking, deal-making, heterosexual sibling who makes sure The Firm’s legitimate and illegitimate businesses run smoothly, while Ronald Kray is the gay psychopath who bashes heads when The Firm needs it (and sometimes when it doesn’t) and likes it very much. The story is told from the point of view of Frances Shea (Emily Browning), who falls for and marries Reggie, thinking she can get him to go straight. She is wrong.

[box_info]Legend
Starring Tom Hardy and Emily Browning. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, based on John Pearson’s biography. Rated R.[/box_info]

Hardy is terrific here both at capturing the brothers’ mutual codependence on each other (even though Reg is repeatedly advised to cut Ronnie loose) and at the physical demands of the roles, especially when Reg and Ron get into a furniture-breaking, testicle-squeezing fight with each other in their nearly-empty nightclub. Particularly, Hardy makes Ron into a fascinating figure, a bespectacled, unsmiling yob who seems barely able to string two sentences together but then drops polysyllabic words and intellectual references when you least expect them.

Helgeland, though, is the wrong filmmaker for this. He conjures up one memorable visual when Reg woos Frances from the street underneath her bedroom window, and the canted angle makes Reg’s off-kilter charm apparent. However, this 131-minute film wanders hither and yon with the story, touching on the Krays’ relations with Fleet Street, British celebrities, the homosexual underground, the American mafia, Harold Wilson’s government, and the dogged Scotland Yard cop (Christopher Eccleston) who eventually brings them down without ever shedding real light on any of them. The relationship between Reg and Frances — and a jealous Ronnie’s attempts to come between them — is supposed to provide the anchor for this wide-ranging story, but Browning gets swamped here, not that there are many actresses who could hold up to two Tom Hardys. In his haste to differentiate the twins, Helgeland makes Ronnie gay when the real Ronald Kray was actually bisexual, a careless touch at best. And why is there no reference to the testimony that surfaced decades after Pearson’s biography was published, alleging that Ronnie actually murdered Frances so he could keep his brother to himself?

The director does make Swinging London look authentically lived-in, and he stages a few well-executed action sequences, like the one where the Krays beat up a pub full of Richardson thugs. The Welsh singer Duffy is nicely cast as Timi Yuro, the white American soul singer who performed in the Krays’ nightclub. Neither these nor Hardy’s dual showcase come close to elevating Legend into the gangland romantic tragedy that Helgeland wants to make. What could have been a blazing entry into the pantheon of great British mob dramas is instead a dish of stale pudding.