Tom Hardy is on a role. This time, he gives us double the pleasure playing a set of infamous gangster Kray twins who set the ’60s on fire.
So who exactly were the Kray twins? Identical twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray were Britain’s most infamous gangsters, rising from humble roots to rule London’s nightclub scene for much of the swinging sixties, until a fateful blend of mental illness and lust for violence brought their dream to a catastrophic end.
Narrated by Reggie’s wife Frances (Emily Browning), LEGEND follows the twins as they swiftly rise through the ranks of the London underworld by crushing their rivals and placing local authorities in compromising positions. Enforcing their dominion by means of assault, robbery, and murder, the Krays forge alliances with American crime lords as they seek to make London into the Las Vegas of Europe. But success makes the volatile Ronnie increasingly careless, and what had been a smoothly run and fantastically lucrative operation soon begins to spin violently out of control.
Hardy brilliantly tackles the personalities of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the former smoothly ruthless, the latter an impulsive sociopath while the overall scene captures the thrills and pitfalls of a pair of lives lived on — and way over — the edge.
TIFF 2015.
Leave a Reply