Legend (2015)
Directed by Brian Helgeland
Suave, charming and volatile, Reggie Kray and his unstable twin brother Ronnie start to leave their mark on the London underworld in the 1960s. Using violence to get what they want, the siblings orchestrate robberies and murders while running nightclubs and protection rackets. With police Detective Leonard "Nipper" Read hot on their heels, the brothers continue their rapid rise to power and achieve tabloid notoriety.
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30 films that influenced Legend
What critics say influenced Legend
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.
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.
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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.”
Times have changed since Bette Davis lit her own cigarette in the good-twin-bad-twin vehicles A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer.
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”).
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.
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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).