Two psychos for the price of one

Rating: 6/10 (21 September 2015)

The key question: Is this version of the Kray brothers' story better than the 1990 version starring the Kemp brothers as the twins who ran one of London's mini-Mafias in the 1960s? The answer: Not really. It's very much a one-man tour-de-force from Tom Hardy playing both Reggie and Ronnie. Emily Browning gives a good account of herself as Frances, the East End girl who makes the mistake of falling in love with Reg. Tara Fitzgerald has a couple of good scenes as Frances's disapproving mother, but the role of the Kray boys' mum (Billie Whitelaw in overdrive in 1990 as a kind of British Ma Barker!) has almost vanished.
The script focuses on Reg and Frances, with Reg constantly promising to give up his gangster life and always reneging on these promises. Ronnie, the gay psycho, hovers in the background with the slightly pantomime air of Anthony Hopkins's take on Hannibal Lecter. There's a clear divide between Hardy's two performances, although towards the end, when Reg commits the crime which sends him to jail for 33 years, he also seems psychotic - not the way the courts saw it.
The 1990 film gave a better sense of their 'empire' developing. This screenplay seems to keep going over the same ground: the scenes between Reg and Frances, the tension between the brothers, brawls in pubs and nightclubs. My favourite scenes were those with John Sessions on fine form as Lord Boothby, the Tory peer with a weakness for rent boys supplied by Ronnie (I think Boothby was fictionalised in the 1990 version).
LEGEND scores high points for evoking the atmosphere of the Sixties. In the annals of infamy the Kray brothers were minor villains, but this film, like the earlier one, reminds us that London's history has always included men like Reg and Ronnie who pander to the seedy vices of the not-so-great, the not-so-good.