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Emily Browning and Tom Hardy in Legend (2015)

Identical twin gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray terrorize London during the 1960s. Identical twin gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray terrorize London during the 1960s. Identical twin gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray terrorize London during the 1960s.

Brian Helgeland
John Pearson
Emily Browning
Taron Egerton
354 User reviews
285 Critic reviews
55 Metascore
6 wins & 12 nominations

Top cast 99+

Reggie Kray …

Frances Shea

Mad Teddy Smith

Albert Donoghue

Nipper Read

Constable Scott

Dr Humphries

Pat Connolly

The Double R Club Singer
(as Major Johnson Finley)

Joan Collins

Ronnie Hart

Ronnie Bender

Jack McVitie

Eddie Richardson
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Tom Hardy had 35 shooting days in which he played both brothers on the same day. He would film the scenes with the brother who had the most dialogue first, then go back into hair and make-up to be transformed into the other brother.
Goofs The scene showing Ronnie and Reggie being acquitted in court ends with the judge banging his gavel. British judges have never used gavels.

Ronald Kray : [on his twin stabbing Jack] Why would you do that?

Reggie Kray : [walks up so he is pressing his forehead against his twin] Because I CAN'T KILL YOU! No matter how much I fucking want to!

Crazy credits "This motion picture used sustainability strategies to reduce its carbon emissions and environmental impact."
Connections Featured in Lost in Adaptation: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (2015)
Soundtracks Tea for Two Written by Irving Caesar , Vincent Youmans Performed by Teddy Wilson & His All-Stars Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment Inc

User reviews 354

alanbenfieldjr
Aug 24, 2017

Everything New on Prime Video in October

How long is Legend? Powered by Alexa
November 20, 2015 (United States)
United Kingdom
United States
Official Facebook
Leyenda: La profesión de la violencia
Pelicci's Cafe, Bethnal Green Road, London, England, UK
Cross Creek Pictures
Working Title Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$30,000,000 (estimated)
Nov 22, 2015
$42,972,994

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Runtime 2 hours 12 minutes
Dolby Atmos

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Legend, movie review: Tom Hardy is brilliant in this weird love story about the Kray twins

Brian helgeland, 131 mins, starring: tom hardy, taron egerton, emily browning, christopher eccleston, paul anderson, david thewlis, article bookmarked.

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Tom Hardy as Ronnie (left) and Reggie Kray in new film 'Legend'

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It’s the proudest day of Reggie Kray’s life. He is standing in the church, waiting for his young bride Frances to walk down the aisle. His brother Ronnie is alongside him. The bespectacled Ronnie is a little taller and more thickset than his brother. They are identical twins but we can easily tell them apart.

This is a scene from midway through Brian Helgeland’s new film. What makes the scene - and the film - so startling is that both Reggie and Ronnie are played by the same actor, Tom Hardy.

Hardy gives an utterly fascinating performances in his dual role. His Ronnie is menacing, psychotic but also comic. He can be every bit as intimidating as the actor’s uber-villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises but he also chatters away like Peter Cook gossiping with Dudley Moore in the pub in one of his Derek and Clive sketches with Dudley Moore. “I’m 'omosexual,” he tells his brother’s startled fiancée the first time he meets her in what passes with for small talk.

Reggie, meanwhile, is dapper, very soulful when he is sharing lemon sherbets with the beautiful young Frances (Emily Browning) but calculating when violence is called for. We see a couple of examples of his notorious “cigarette” punch. As John Pearson’s book, The Profession Of Violence , on which the film is loosely based, explains, this was when Reggie would offer someone a cigarette and then, as the man opened his mouth to take it, would hit him on the side of the jaw. (“An open jaw will fracture easily,” Pearson explains Reggie’s thinking.)

Legend is a biopic on a very lavish scale. The characters are British, the setting is London in the 1960s, but the film has the feel of an American gangster epic. It takes a mythologising and, at times, absurdly romantic, approach to its low-life heroes. In spite of the bloodletting and violence, it is a very glossy film, beautifully shot in luxuriant widescreen colour by cinematographer Dick Pope (fresh from Mr Turner, his biopic of artist J.M.W Turner) and with plenty of Burt Bacharach on the soundtrack.

In a bust-up in an East End pub in which Ronnie and Reggie are using hammers and knuckledusters, you can’t help but notice the incongruously artful way that Pope uses daytime light. In another scene, as we see the twins’ dour policeman nemesis Leonard “Nipper” Reid (a scowling Christopher Eccleston) prowling through the alleyways of the East End, Pope makes Bethnal Green as mysterious and labyrinthine as the Casbah.

Tom Hardy and Emily Browning as Reggie Kray and Franie Shea in Legend

Helgeland’s screenplay starts well into the Kray brothers’ criminal career. He doesn’t bother with their East End childhood, their early days as boxers or their time spent AWOL or behind bars during National Service. Their beloved mum Violet is barely glimpsed outside one or two scenes in which she offers tea and cake to the boys. The film features an ethereal voice-over from Frances (Emily Browning) which introduces us to the brothers grim when they are already in their 1960s pomp, with Reggie established as “the gangster prince of the East End” and Ronnie diagnosed as a violent schizophrenic, which to him is a badge of honour. There is early skirmishing with the Krays’ arch-enemies, the Richardsons, but soon the twins and all-powerful and their influence is stretching into the West End. They are even trying to strike deals with Meyer Lansky and the American mob, using the weasel-like fixer Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) as their go-between.

In the melting pot of swinging London, old class barriers are breaking down. In one telling early sequence, Reggie takes Frances into the nightclub he runs. He is greeted with deference by all the villains, minor celebrities and aristocrats who hang out there.

The sequence seems like both a self-conscious homage to the famous steadicam shot in Goodfellas and a reminder that gangsters were moving in the very highest circles. This is reinforced by the hilarious scenes in which Ronnie befriends the perverted British Tory politician Lord Boothby (John Sessions), who begins to frequent his gay parties. “Good lord, that’s Bob Boothby at an orgy,” Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Kevin McNally) almost chokes on his pipe when he is shown a newspaper with an incriminating picture. Any hopes if making political capital out of the scandal vanish when it turns out that a Labour politician, Tom Driberg, is involved too.

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The key events in the Kray story - the shooting of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar pub, the stabbing to death of Jack “The Hat” McVittie in Stoke Newington - have been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. These moments are present and correct but aren’t foregrounded. The film’s main focus is on the relationship between Reggie and Frances. It is through her eyes that she we see the brothers.

Helgeland makes it very clear that the twins had utterly different approaches toward their criminal careers. Reggie craved wealth and legitimacy. Ronnie was in it for the aggro. He very quickly grew bored unless there was violence and chaos to distract him.

The writer-director doesn’t indulge in the expressionistic, mind-bending style of psychedelic filmmaking found in Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s Performance (1970), which was partially inspired by the Krays. Nor does he slavishly takes us through their lives in the way that Peter Medak did in The Krays (1990), starring Martin and Gary Kemp. Instead, a little bizarrely, he has turned a film about Britain’s most notorious gangsters into a love story. The film foregrounds Frances, one of the least well-known characters in Kray twin history. In a beguiling performance, Emily Browning plays her as a free-spirited but naive and ultimately tragic figure who is both devoted to Reggie and desperate to get away from him and his toxic world. She provides the film with an emotional core it wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Legend , as its title suggests, isn’t a social realist account of Reggie, Ronnie and their misdeeds. Hardy plays both villains on a grand scale. There is some stomach churning violence here but the film portrays the Krays in a glamorised, nostalgic fashion. This is certainly not a version that Nipper Read would have endorsed but even he might have admired the sheer effrontery and flamboyance of Hardy’s brilliant, double-barrelled performance.

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Review: ‘Legend,’ Starring Tom Hardy as the Gangster Twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray

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By Manohla Dargis

Nov. 19, 2015

Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy are the reasons to see “Legend,” a gangster flick in which he does double duty as Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the British gangster twins who had a moment in the 1960s. Outside Britain, the Krays are probably now known less for their actual exploits than for their representations, either as vaguely obscured supporting attractions (in Mike Hodges’s dazzling 1971 genre-defining “ Get Carter ,” starring Michael Caine) or as the main event (notably, the 1990 biopic “ The Krays ,” with Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame). The Krays weren’t especially memorable as criminals, but they knew how to strut and swing through 1960s London.

Movie Review: ‘Legend’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “legend.”.

In “Legend,” that milieu, with its flirty skirts and tight suits, swoony rides and tuneful hits, appears to have been the main impetus driving the writer and director, Brian Helgeland. Along with his team, he has kitted out the movie handsomely, from the sea-foam green Lincoln that glides through the East End like a pampered shark to the floral-choked wallpaper that lines the brothers’ ancestral home like pressed funeral flowers. (The director of photography is Dick Pope, who paints the scene with warm, dark colors, while the eye-soothing and -poking production design is by Tom Conroy.) It’s all quite lovely, save for the occasional splash of red that reminds you that all the Krays’ flash came with a price, as the narrator, Frances (Emily Browning), regularly announces.

Frances serves as the movie’s guide and rather less convincingly as its moral compass. A sparrow who flutters into a lion’s mouth when she hooks up with Reggie, she pulls the movie in one direction (bad, Krays, bad), even as they and the mighty Mr. Hardy effortlessly yank it back. They may have been terrible, these two, but from the evidence of the movie, they were fairly amusing company, intentionally or not. That, at least, is how Mr. Helgeland plays it, dropping in lightly funny exchanges — as when Ronnie bluntly announces his homosexuality to a startled American gangster — with the Krays’ dirtier dealings. Yet while those get filthy and sometimes sanguineous, it’s notable that the scariest Kray is their mother (a terrific Jane Wood, sliding in and out of the movie like a shiv).

Fight Scene: ‘Legend’

A scene where the kray brothers, played by tom hardy, fight each other in brian helgeland film "legend.".

More Mama Kray might have added additional layers to this dual portrait, but Mr. Helgeland has gone for broad, not profound. That shifts the burden to Mr. Hardy, who lightly hoists it with grimaces, body language, an apparent prosthetic and lots of swirling cigar and cigarette smoke. Mr. Hardy is one of those actors who periodically like to pull a Lon Chaney (silent cinema’s man of a thousand faces) by hiding in plain sight. He’s done bald and bulky, blond and sleek ; more perversely, he has masked his face with beard fuzz and appliances. Here, he plays a long game of performance peekaboo, parading his good looks around as Reggie, and hiding them as Ronnie. As a character study, it proves about as deep as Goofus and Gallant in the British underworld, but it’s also consistently fun to watch.

In the end, the Krays’ most lasting contribution may have been cinematic. Duncan Campbell, writing in The Guardian, has zeroed in on a 1965 David Bailey photo of the Krays as a defining moment for the twins and their cultural impact. “The portrait became gangland’s Mona Lisa — copied, pirated and imitated, it was central to their image and their brand,” he writes. Soon afterward, Mr. Bailey released a photo collection that featured the Krays as well as a third brother, Charlie , alongside boldface names like Mick Jagger and Jean Shrimpton. The Krays were cool only by proxy, but they became celebrities of a kind, and their look filtered into the gangster film iconography, inspiring the likes of Guy Ritchie. Every time you see another stupid thug playing the peacock, blame them.

“Legend” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun and knife violence. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.

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Film Review: Tom Hardy in ‘Legend’

Hardy's astonishing, award-caliber twin turn as the notorious Kray brothers deepens and darkens Brian Helgeland's biopic.

By Guy Lodge

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There are two good reasons to make what might otherwise seem an inessential new biopic of Ronnie and Reggie Kray — and both of them, as it happens, take the formidable form of Tom Hardy . Playing both the infamously savage Cockney crime lords in a dazzling feat of thespian self-splicing to rival Jeremy Irons in “Dead Ringers,” Hardy’s inspired twin turn elevates and complicates the otherwise straightforward terrain of “ Legend ,” in which U.S. writer-helmer Brian Helgeland gives London’s East End gangland a slightly touristic candy-coating of Swinging ’60s glamor. While Helgeland’s script lacks the wit and grit of his Oscar-winning job on “L.A. Confidential,” this lengthy, engrossing underworld saga creditably attempts to work a female perspective — that of Reggie’s innocent wife, Frances — into these laddish proceedings. If the Hardy Boys’ film-swallowing contribution ultimately thwarts the effort, that can’t be helped.

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Given an enduring local fascination with the Brothers Kray, business should boom in Blighty, where the pic opens ahead of its international premiere in Toronto. In the U.S., “Legend” may viably be marketed two ways by the currently indomitable Universal: as a lavishly violent genre outing and as a more prestigious awards vehicle for its duplicated leading man. Interestingly, Hardy’s own performance splits along comparable lines. His Reggie is a suave, charismatically volatile antihero calculated to inspire perverse admiration among younger male auds; his playfully eccentric inhabitation of the gay, mentally unstable Ronnie would, on its own, rep the more extravagant bid for thespian kudos. That both these distinct achievements — the work of a vital movie star and a resourceful character actor, respectively — are contained within a single performance is, of course, its true marvel. The illusion is achieved so fluidly and separably that the practicalities of the stunt are soon forgotten.

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As a performance showcase, then, “Legend” is more sensational than Peter Medak’s meaner, muddier 1990 biopic “The Krays,” which nonetheless boasted fine work from New Romantic balladeers Gary and Martin Kemp. It’s less satisfying as psychological profile: For all Hardy’s expressive detail and physical creativity, Helgeland’s chewy, incident-packed script offers little insight into what made either of these contrasting psychopaths tick, or finally explode. Where Medak’s film focused extensively on the twins’ warped relationship with their dangerously doting mother, Violet (so vividly drawn by Billie Whitelaw), she’s a peripheral presence here. Rather, it’s Frances Shea — the working-class ingenue who married Reggie in her teens before succumbing to drugs and depression — who acts as the story’s principal female agent. Played by Emily Browning , Frances is even granted the film’s guiding voiceover, narrating the Krays’ antics in disillusioned tones from the outset until, via a cruel structural fillip, her point of view is harshly stymied.

It’s an unexpected way into the legend, but a compromised one. Despite Browning’s sympathetic efforts, Frances remains something of a cipher in the very story she’s telling, as the film dwells only cursorily on the mental and physical abuse she endured at the hands of her husband. On the more central subject of the Krays’ growing criminal empire, her point of view takes on an unconvincing omniscience; in assuming equal narrative authority on their domestic and professional lives, the device winds up selling both a little short.

While the framing is askew, the picture within is still a compelling one. Helgeland has fashioned the Krays’ rearing of London’s underworld from the gutters of Whitechapel to the sequin-lined heart of Soho as a bloodily romanticized evocation of time and place not dissimilar to “Bugsy’s” from-the-ground-up chronicle of the Las Vegas Strip. Dick Pope’s lensing frequently opts for comic-book extremities in its angles and compositions; production designer Tom Conroy revels in mirrored, brandy-tinted surfaces and heedlessly of-the-moment interior kitsch. Costume designer Caroline Harris, meanwhile, races through impeccably contoured, magazine-ready ensembles as recklessly as their freshly wealthy wearers presumably bought them. (Clothes maketh the men rather brilliantly when it comes to distinguishing the Krays themselves: Reggie’s spiv-slick suits are tailored, finished and carried so differently from Ronnie’s more ungainly gear as to denote a different physique entirely.)

If all this lacquered period veneer gives the film a faint air of dress-up — right down to retro-inclined contemporary pop star Duffy turning up as a sultry lounge singer — that’s at least somewhat appropriate to a downfall narrative in which surface prosperity is all too easily stripped away. (Less excusable is a rather literal-minded soundtrack of ’60s jukebox standards that smothers Carter Burwell’s ripe score.) Even viewers unfamiliar with the Krays’ story will swiftly deduce the genre-dictated direction of things, as the film routinely checks in with doggedly trailing police detective Leonard “Nipper” Read (a grimacing Christopher Eccleston) between the boys’ increasingly grisly exploits. Similarly, the meet-cute initiation of Reggie’s relationship with Frances hardly makes the subsequent souring of their marriage (between sporadic jail stints) any less surprising: Hers is a cautionary tale structured along similar, albeit grimmer, lines to “An Education.”

Most intriguing amid Helgeland’s tangle of familiar plot strands is Ronnie’s terse expression of his homosexuality — both to calculated professional ends, as the notorious orgies he hosts at his modest Bethnal Green apartment implicate high-flying political abettors, and more vulnerably private ones. His romantic relationship with young lackey Teddy Smith (a poignant, underused Taron Egerton, in very different gun-toting territory from “Kingsman”) is played in tender fashion, though it’s disappointing that the film, seemingly nervous of offending less liberal male auds, presents it in such coy terms. Still, whether taunting fellow heavies with pre-emptive admissions of his sexual preferences, brutishly declaring his own fragility to his bemused brother or making pie-in-the-sky plans to build an urban utopia in Nigeria, the formerly institutionalized Ronnie is the film’s most fascinating, conflicted figure — and the one whose interior life most eludes Frances’ narration.

Adopting a singularly strange, phlegmy vocal delivery, Hardy gleefully plays up his peculiar sense of etiquette, while locating a slim core of perceptive decency in his madness. Projecting a sense of near-feral bewilderment at the world’s demands, he wears his own skin fretfully; playboy Reggie, on the other hand, slides into his like a broken-in pair of loafers. This fundamental conflict in the Krays’ respective states of being is one Hardy wryly articulates even as the film concerns itself with plottier cops-and-robbers activity; if there’s an upside to “Legend’s” baggy structure and distracted focus, it’s that it allows ample room for this remarkable dual characterization to breathe and bellow.

Reviewed at Working Title screening room, London, July 23, 2015. (In Toronto Film Festival — Gala Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 131 MIN.

Production: (U.K.) A Universal Pictures (in U.S.)/Studiocanal (in U.K.) release of a Studiocanal presentation of a Working Title production in association with Anton Capital Entertainment, Amazon Prime Instant Video. Produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Chris Clark, Quentin Curtis, Brian Oliver. Executive producers, Kate Solomon, Amelia Granger, Liza Chasin, Olivier Courson, Ron Halpern, Tom Hardy, Tyler Thompson, Timmy Thompson. Co-producer, Jane Robertson.
Crew: Directed, written by Brian Helgeland, adapted from the book "The Profession of Violence" by John Pearson. Camera (color, widescreen), Dick Pope; editor, Peter McNulty; music, Carter Burwell; music supervisor, Liz Gallacher; production designer, Tom Conroy; art directors, Gareth Cousins, Marco Restivo; set decorator, Crispian Sallis; costume designer, Caroline Harris; sound (Dolby Atmos), Danny Hamsbrook; supervising sound editor, Dominic Gibbs; re-recording mixers, Jeffrey Haboush, Mark Taylor; visual effects supervisor, Adam Rowland; visual effects, Nvizible; stunt coordinator, Julian Spencer; assistant director, Jack Ravenscroft; casting, Lucinda Syson.
With: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Taron Egerton, Christopher Eccleston, Chazz Palminteri, Tara Fitzgerald, Jane Wood, Paul Bettany, Colin Morgan, Paul Anderson, Stephen Lord, Duffy.

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