Legend - it's a hard mob life

Ronnie and Reggie Kray remain England’s most notorious crime family of the past 100 years.

Former boxers turned gangsters, they ruled London’s East End throughout the 1960s through protection rackets, shady nightclubs and old-school violence – back when that meant knives, knuckle dusters and savage fistfights.

Their infamy reached a considerable peak. While privately murdering rivals in cold blood, they publicly wined and dined celebrities of the time, including Eastender Barbara Windsor.

The story has reached the big screen before, in director Peter Medak’s The Kray Twins from 1990. Most terrifyingly of all, it featured as the titular leads Gary and Martin Kemp, identical twins and stars of 1980s new romantic balladeers Spandau Ballet. Shockingly, the Kemps lacked a sufficient level of menace to sound convincing.

This time, Tom Hardy plays both Ronnie and Reggie, with computer wizardy depicting the pair together. Herein lies Legend's genuine achievement. Hardy, the best reason to see this film, manages to conjure up a sense of chemistry between the brothers. He's playing off against himself. While this has been tried and tested before in David Fincher’s The Social Network, in which Armie Hammer played real-life twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the results here are just as seamless.

It mightn’t win Hardy an Oscar (though he’s surely in with a shout for a Bafta), but whatever plaudits he gets he deserves – it’s evidently his most stunning acting achievement yet on screen.

Another excellent performance comes from Emily Browning as Reggie’s wife Frances Shea and the film’s narrator. She must be the first female character to utter the phrase “fuck your mum” to a spouse and retain a hefty charm.

Given these performances, it’s a shame that a pervading disappointment creeps in around 30 minutes from the start.

There are thinly stretched nuances of the script’s portrayal of Ronnie. A handful of his lines - “I wanted this to be a shootout, like a western” - stray too far into cartoon territory; and that’s a phrase absolutely nobody familiar with the Krays would associate with Ronnie. At one point he sounds like a cockney Josh Widdecombe.

Too often, Ronnie spits out wisecracks unbefitting for a sadistic psychopath who terrorised not just his criminal peers. Bookies, shopkeepers and pub landlords; all were forced to pay crippling sums to Ronnie and his cohorts throughout the mid to late 1960s, under threats of stabbings, brawls and torture.

This vice-like grip via fear and paranoia, which permeated throughout the cobbled street communities and terraced houses in the East End, is only just apparent in tone. But it’s precisely what fuelled the Krays’ power. It’s how they cultivated their own legend.

And this brings us to another reason why it disappoints; there’s a sense of restrain, a missing panache in the direction that doesn’t quite bring to life the sights, smells, scuzzy pie ‘n’ mash shops, thick fumes and old guvnor cackles of 1960s east London. Backdrops don’t quite convince as the dank back streets of Whitechapel. For a certain older British audience, the constructed staging will be too bleedin’ obvious.

Legend is perhaps the only occasion when a film depicting inner city London needed more kitchen-sink grit.

Maybe the Krays will never get the ‘British Goodfellas’ they deserve – maybe they don’t deserve it.