The mobster/gangster film genre is a tough nut to crack if your name isn't Martin Scorsese or you don't belong to The Godfather trilogy. Many have tried and come close (Road to Perdition, The Untouchables, Donnie Brasco, American Gangster, Black Mass), while others have tried and failed miserably (We Own The Night, Alpha Dog, Gangster Squad, Running Scared). It's such a tough genre to nail when you have to live up to the likes of Goodfellas, Scarface, Gangs of New York, and my favorite, The Departed. However, a good start on the way to becoming one of the greats is to immediately cast Tom Hardy to play the gangster and then cast Tom Hardy once again to play the gangster's twin gangster brother. That, right there, is hard to mess up. And while Legend didn't mess up and fail as a gangster/mobster/crime film... it's going to fade right into that middling ground.
The film begins strong and sort of sludges through the rest. We begin with a female voiceover telling us about Ronald and Reggie Kray (Hardy), identical twin bruvas in East London who run the crime racket. Ronald is suave, sophisticated, well-spoken (even for a cockney), and a brute. Reggie, on the other hand, is certifiably insane, an assumed paranoid schizophrenic, a brute with no remorse whatsoever, and a proud homosexual (one who gives, but does not receive-- also made very clearly). Their rise to power is the tale of Legend. Taking out rival crime syndicates, avoiding the police, keeping Reggie in check, and Ronn falling in love with his wife Frances (Emily Browning). The first half hour or so of the film where we are getting to know the brothers is some of the best parts of the film. They both have their own distinct personalities and they're both funny in their own way. But, it's somewhere around the marriage of Ronn and Frances that the movie just kind of slows way down and borders around boring. There isn't a whole lot of gangster violence happening and it's all just kind of murky. There's nothing I can pin down that really hurts the film in the middle, it just felt like it was lacking.
Something it wasn't lacking, however, was a spectacular double performance by Tom Hardy. He's as good in this film as he's ever been. There seems to be this weird thing with Hardy where he's either the suave, outspoken, semi-quirky character and, lately, the quiet, brooding, strong silent type character who everyone fears. The beauty of Legend is that he's both. Ronn is the Hardy from Inception while Regg is the psychotic, violent Hardy from Lawless/Mad Max/Warrior. No matter what is taking place in any given scene there is always the tension that one of the Hardys is going to snap and kill the fuck out of someone. Maybe it's the looming doom that isn't acted upon much that leads to film's mediocrity. Maybe it was just my messed up brain wanting more violence than what actually happened. Maybe Regg was set up to be so psychotic that I wanted it all the time. Maybe it was just an okay film. Either way, Tom Hardy amps the film up three levels higher with his performances alone. It actually reminded me of the already forgotten film Black Mass where the film itself was just okay, but the performance of Johnny Depp as gangster Whitey Bulger elevated the film higher than it deserved. Either way, Tom Hardy is GOD.
There were a bunch of little details that kind of got on my nerves. There was the constant, and mostly unnecessary narration via Frances (which makes little sense after seeing the film). There were set ups that didn't pay off and just little nitpicky things. Essentially when walking out of the film it was one of those things where all I could do was talk about how great Tom Hardy was in it and that ONE MEGA ULTRA VIOLENT SCENE THAT WAS AWESOME, but that's about it. I couldn't really think back to a particular sequence of moments or act that really did it for me. Like I said, it started strong, but it fizzles pretty quickly never really catching the steam it had in the beginning.
C
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