Brian Helgeland
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Connections, in both directions
Liberally borrowing from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas / Casino handbook, director Brian Helgeland uses long-take shots through boisterous clubs, unreliable narration and splashes of violence to create a drama of little surprise and even less impact.
A schizophrenic homosexual, Ronnie is a spiritual successor to Joe Pesci from Goodfellas .
Helgeland stages a sensational tribute to Goodfellas, a long take in which the duo parade (through the front door) into a high-end club that Reggie owns, with swells and lowlifes and entertainers kowtowing to the swain and his prize.
The voiceover narration, combined especially with a long tracking shot of Reggie leading Frances into his premiere club, as well as the musical choices owe a great debt to Goodfellas .
Just because a film looks like GoodFellas and sounds like Casino doesn’t make it a Martin Scorsese movie.
Imagine “GoodFellas” narrated by Lorraine Bracco.
Legend has the additional Shakespearean element of the twin brothers, mirrored but also contrasted and at odds (Peter Medak’s 1990 The Krays played up the Oedipal angst around the boys’ dotty mother).
Peter Medak’s 1990 film The Krays previously took a chilling stab at their story, but Helgeland’s take is altogether sleeker, flashier and more glamorised, tapping into the mythic celebrity image they created for themselves and pandering to a certain peculiar nostalgia.
The story of the Kray twins was the subject of an excellent 1990 movie, "The Krays," that starred Gary and Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet as the brothers and Billie Whitelaw as their creepy mother.
The Krays’ older brother, Charlie, is never mentioned, while mum Violet (Jane Wood) was considerably more present in 1990’s The Krays .
Their story was told previously in the superior 1990 film “The Krays” starring siblings Martin and Gary Kemp of the band Spandau Ballet.
Playing both the infamously savage Cockney crime lords in a dazzling feat of thespian self-splicing to rival Jeremy Irons in “Dead Ringers,” Hardy’s inspired twin turn elevates and complicates the otherwise straightforward terrain of “Legend,” in which U.S. writer-helmer Brian Helgeland gives London’s East End gangland a slightly touristic candy-coating of Swinging ’60s glamor.
Helgeland could have learned a great deal from the blocking of dual Jeremy Irons accomplished by David Cronenberg in “Dead Ringers,” which made the viewer feel as if there were really two different people in the frame.
Identical-twin performances have been attempted before (from Jeremy Irons's creep gynecologists in Dead Ringers to the forcibly wacky hijinks of Michael Keaton's many selves in Multiplicity ), but never has the cinematic trick been so convincing as it is here.
If the result doesn’t equal Jeremy Irons’ feat in “Dead Ringers,” that’s because the brothers in David Cronenberg’s film were far more subtle creations than the real-life gangsters Hardy portrays, who are both more easily differentiated—one wears glasses and the other doesn’t—and, each in his own way, far more theatrically extravagant.
Having originally offered Hardy the role of Reggie, Helgeland was persuaded to let the actor wrestle with Ron as well (both on and off screen), a dual role to which he brings the same commitment – physical, intellectual, emotional – as Jeremy Irons essaying both Mantle brothers in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers .
As would be expected from Hardy, it’s a bravura dual performance, putting him in that rarified category of actors (including Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers and Nicolas Cage in Adaptation.) who have conquered the challenge of playing twins in a way that doesn’t feel forced or gimmicky.
Drawing from the same pulp novel as John Boorman's great 1967 "Point Blank," screenwriter Brian Helgeland's intermittently diverting directorial debut is intentionally spun from the same wiry strands as the work of such unpretentious journeymen as Don Siegel (there's even a sly reference to Siegel's "Charley Varrick" in a hotel's name).
And with characters named Carter (a nod to 1971's original Get Carter) and Bronson (a nod to Charles Bronson, the star of many a '70s crime/revenge thriller), references to the Outfit (a nod to John Flynn's 1973 crime-thriller, The Outfit, which is also based on a Westlake novel) and a bar named Varrick's (a nod to Don Siegel's 1973 crime gem Charley Varrick), Payback is a tough, entertaining homage to the kind of gritty '70s crime film that long ago gave way to a slicker yet tamer form of action movie.
Liberally borrowing from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas / Casino handbook, director Brian Helgeland uses long-take shots through boisterous clubs, unreliable narration and splashes of violence to create a drama of little surprise and even less impact.
Just because a film looks like GoodFellas and sounds like Casino doesn’t make it a Martin Scorsese movie.
If all that sounds a little like Goodfellas , Casino , Mean Streets … well, it’s hard to deny the Martin Scorsese influence on Legend .
Where Danish Gir l’s final act succumbs to conventional award season pandering, Legend (4/10) is almost entirely emulating (or ripping off) Scorsese crime masterpieces like Goodfellas or Casino .
The Krays are essentially De Niro and Pesci from Casino but with the same genes.
…only vaguely resembles the book on which it was based ("The Hunter" by Richard Stark) or the previous movie version, John Boorman's "Point Blank."
Directed by Brian Helgeland (the screenwriter for L.A. Confidential ) in his feature debut, Payback is a re-make of John Boorman's 1967 edge-of-the-seat movie, Point Blank.
…novel more than 30 years ago in the still enjoyable Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin in the Gibson role), forcing the picture to be moved off of last summer?s…
It's an adaptation of Richard Stark's book The Hunter -- which also was the basis for John Boorman's highly regarded 1967 film Point Blank, with Lee Marvin in the role played now by Gibson.
The story's based on The Hunter, an old book by pulp novelist Donald E. Westlake (writing pseudonymously), the same one that also inspired the 1967 Lee Marvin film Point Blank, directed by John Boorman.
Payback is a new version of Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, which was brilliantly filmed in 1967 as Point Blank.
The death of an unlucky thug named George Cornell (Shane Attwooll) recalls Michael Corleone’s dinner with Sollozzo in “The Godfather.”
A filmmaker doesn’t have to glamorize the gangster lifestyle like Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather ; Scorsese’s brutal forays into the genre have been no less compelling.
It would be like expecting Kay to do most of the heavy lifting in “The Godfather.”
It doesn't have the depth of "Gladiator" or the charm of "The Princess Bride."
You can just hear the post-modern pitch that director/writer/producer Brian Helgeland, an Oscar winner for his script for L.A. Confidential, made to the studio heads: We'll put one of those hunky Aussie imports in armor, just like Russell Crowe in Gladiator but younger.
By that time in the movie, I didnt care: I had seen enough of the low-rent Gladiator rip-off sets; I had seen enough of Heath Ledger trying to be earnest.
So the story is thin and unoriginal, more or less a smaller-scale version of 2000's "Gladiator," and there isn't a whole lot to ponder when it's over.
Hoping to replicate the success of "Gladiator," but in a lighter vein, Brian Helgeland's "A Knight's Tale" has its bright moments but it never coheres into a viable--or memorable--movie.
Much of the commercial success of "Gladiator" is due to a series of commercials that cleverly compared Russell Crowe's battles in the arena to contemporary pro wrestling and football.
Paying homage to the likes of Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson and Starsky and Hutch ... "Payback" is a "Death Wish" of the '90s.
It should come as no surprise that John Wick is cross-promoting with Payday 2. There are a lot of cinematic antecedents that could be mentioned in discussing John Wick, but this reminded me most strongly of the Mel Gibson version of Payback .
Times have changed since Bette Davis lit her own cigarette in the good-twin-bad-twin vehicles A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer.
William Devane plays an underwritten upper-rung syndicate crook much like the one he played in Marathon Man, where he was in cahoots with Laurence Olivier?s torturous Nazi dentist.
Ron’s ally is their manager, Leslie Payne (David Thewlis), who gladly negotiates a partnership with the American mafia as embodied by Chazz Palminteri, an envoy of a never-seen Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley played that notorious Miami mobster in “Bugsy”).
Even if he has to kill every single person in "The Outfit," he is determined to get the money back.
And with characters named Carter (a nod to 1971's original Get Carter) and Bronson (a nod to Charles Bronson, the star of many a '70s crime/revenge thriller), references to the Outfit (a nod to John Flynn's 1973 crime-thriller, The Outfit, which is also based on a Westlake novel) and a bar named Varrick's (a nod to Don Siegel's 1973 crime gem Charley Varrick), Payback is a tough, entertaining homage to the kind of gritty '70s crime film that long ago gave way to a slicker yet tamer form of action movie.
Compared to the hard-as-nails American action pictures of the 1960s and 1970s (I'm thinking of stuff like Bullitt and The French Connection), Payback is kiddy time, with lots of attitude but nothing truly startling showing up on-screen.
I mean, remember "Ladyhawke," that silly Matthew Broderick medieval fantasy with the laughably inappropriate and oh-so-'80s synthesizer soundtrack?
Identical-twin performances have been attempted before (from Jeremy Irons's creep gynecologists in Dead Ringers to the forcibly wacky hijinks of Michael Keaton's many selves in Multiplicity ), but never has the cinematic trick been so convincing as it is here.
So says reporter Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) in 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and it's advice that American writer-director Brian Helgeland (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of LA Confidential ) has applied to his biopic of gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran roughshod over London’s East End during the 50s and 60s.
Helgeland, whose most recent film was the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 (2013), wrote the script based on John Pearson’s 1995 book The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, and as the book’s title suggests, the film falls very neatly into the time-honored narrative arc associated with the gangster film since The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932).
Payback is a loose remake of Point Blank, the (overpraised) 1967 John Boorman suspenser, but you could argue that it's really a pulpier Dirty Harry minus the hypocrisy.