Multiply the reptilian creepiness of Johnny Depp’s transformative “Black Mass” performance as James “Whitey” Bulger by two, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of “Legend,” a similarly violent crime biopic — this time about identical-twin gangsters.
The most remarkable thing about the film — in fact, the only remarkable thing — is that both Reggie and Ronnie Kray, who ruled the East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s, are played by Tom Hardy. It’s a feat of paired performances, each of which not only chills the blood on its own, but plays off the other like a hellish funhouse mirror.
As Reggie, Hardy makes for a slick Cockney underworld kingpin, whether strutting the streets where he grew up in a dapper suit or taking the best table in his nightclub to entertain his new lady love and eventual wife, Frances (Emily Browning). He’s the glib, confident brains of the gang, known as the “Firm,” exercising tight control over a violent protection racket.
Ronnie, in contrast, is Reggie’s mush-mouthed opposite: the physically thicker and mentally slower — not to mention schizophrenic — muscle of the operation, who relishes meting out mayhem, whether by claw hammer or pistol.
Unlike the bleaker “Black Mass,” “Legend” takes a kind of sick glee in the violence it depicts, rendering one particularly brutal knifing by Reggie (of a former partner-in-crime, Jack “The Hat” McVitie, played by Sam Spruell) with an almost comical frenzy.
“I think you missed a spot,” cracked one critic, to the screen. (To be fair, the actual murder of McVitie was especially vicious: The victim’s body was so perforated by knife wounds that his liver fell out.)
Morally, Hardy’s Krays are equally repugnant creatures, despite moments of tenderness between Reggie and Frances (whom he later appears to rape, off screen). Ronnie’s homosexuality is presented mostly without judgment, as it should be, except for the occasional snicker or two from his fellow gangsters.
Both of the men speak their dialogue (by the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “L.A. Confidential,” Brian Helgeland, who also directs) with such impenetrable English accents that subtitles would prove helpful, at times, in sorting out, say, motivation. Greed and mental illness only suffice, to a degree, in explaining Reggie and Ronnie’s respective actions, but those explanations don’t go very deep.
That’s where Hardy’s tour de force of acting ultimately fails. Hardy is extraordinarily good at evoking the fraught fraternal connection between the Krays. A nasty brawl between the two, over some business disagreement or other, is quite well staged. And their close, almost spiritual, connection is underscored by casting Hardy in both roles. But the film is ultimately unable to plumb the Krays’ deepest souls, if they even have any.
In 1969, the real-life Reggie Kray was convicted of McVitie’s murder and sentenced to prison. The same year, Ronnie was found guilty of a separate killing. Reggie died of cancer in 2000, shortly after being released on compassionate grounds. In 1995, Ronnie died in a mental hospital, where he had been sent after being declared insane.
The film gets all of these (and other) superficial details right. But it leaves two blanks where the complex, contradictory lives behind this “Legend” should be.
