Hardy is great, but bring your own moral compass because the film doesn't have one

Rating: 7/10 (18 September 2015)

Lovable club owner Reg wants nothing more than to settle into domestic bliss with the gorgeous Frances: if only it wasn't for the fixes his dozy twin Ron keeps getting them into, especially when he doesn't take his tablets! And then there's that annoying Nipper Of The Yard, constantly being a nuisance...
Let's get one thing straight: Tom Hardy does a phenomenal job of creating Ronnie and Reggie Kray as two distinct and distinctive characters, and the special effects used to put the two twins together through much of the film are so good that you are never aware of them. And it is a fact that this film is very entertaining, if overflowing with profanity (and I would not argue that the profanity is out of place).
I saw this in a fairly full cinema. A lot of the audience were Women Of A Certain Age who, I suspect, had come along in order to get a double dose of Tom Hardy (it wasn't as uncomfortable as when I was the only man in the audience for magic Mike. I digress). The point is that there was a lot of laughter during the film, and the laughter sometimes came at the most inappropriate moments – Ron makes a quip after blowing the back of George Cornell's head off: call me a reactionary old traditionalist, but I don't think that's very funny, personally.
The film does show us some savagery but, when it does so (Reggie killing Jack The Hat, the murder which saw him put away for the rest of his life), it provides a large chunk of mitigation for it. The Krays are made very sympathetic in this film and, while one appreciates that they were something of folk heroes in their local patch, the fact remains that they were ruthless, murderous thugs, and this film does rather obfuscate that by portraying them as a couple of lovable lads living in an offshoot of sitcomland. It's a good film, but with a worrying absence of moral judgement.