Ronnie is a liability and Reggie forgives him over and over again, even after a spectacularly messy brother-versus-brother (Hardy squared) fight scene.įrances is presented as the third-wheel in this sibling love/bloodfest, but she is only partially drawn and her unraveling is abrupt and unconvincing. “Aristocrats and criminals have a lot in common,” notes Frances, again in voiceover.īut the Krays’ reign is threatened by the reappearance of the Richardson gang (and a Paul Bettany cameo), the exasperation of Payne (David Thewlis), the family fixer, and by the brothers themselves. It matters little, because the most important details are here: the way the Kray brothers managed to palm much of London for a decade, their relationship with American mafia (Chazz Palminteri plays a Meyer Lansky go-between) and how they evaded persecution in part because Reggie was in bed - literally and figuratively - with high-ranking members of the House of Lords. (“I’m not careless with the truth,” says Frances in voiceover - the veracity of the screenplay’s history, however, has been debated overseas.) In fact, both brothers were indiscriminately violent and both are rumoured to have been gay, according to biographers.
That is, when he is not beating people to death with a claw hammer. He is openly gay despite criminal consequences, and he harbours dreams of a charitable project in Nigeria. Let out prematurely from a mental institution - after a threat or two is leveled against the attending psychiatrist - Ronnie lives in the woods for a time and is a rumoured paranoid schizophrenic. Ronnie (Hardy, redux) is the wild, unpredictable one. He courts her by bringing her lemon sherbets, then flowers, then an engagement ring, presented after he climbs a drainpipe to her second-floor tenement window. Reggie (Hardy) is the sane twin: elegantly turned out, he’s no match for young Frances Shea (Emily Browning). In Legend, the brothers are already the undisputed kings of London’s East End, where residents would rather “kiss a gangster” than “talk to a policeman” notes Scotland Yard’s diligent cop “Nipper” Read (Christopher Eccleston) with disgust. Hardy does barely-decipherable double-duty in Legend, in which he plays both of the notorious Kray brothers, gangsters who ruled London in the 1960s.īrian Helgeland’s adaptation is the first big-screen Kray portrayal since Spandau Ballet’s Gary and Martin Kemp in Peter Medak’s 1990 film, The Krays. Look at his backwoods Virginia brogue in Lawless, his masked Bane in Batman Dark Knight and, masked again, his Mad Max from earlier this year. Making yourself almost-understood is an art form, and Tom Hardy excels at it.
MORRIS: This is quite a complicated brew because I'm not sure whether that's smug or psychotic.There really ought to be an award for mumble-mouthed acting. I'm trying to do a joke that will make people laugh and you can see the fear and confusion on their faces. LEE: But what's the last thing they would expect? Something funny just being said, and that's what I'm trying to do. What you've done is evolve a system that knowingly operates that make people laugh by any means possible apart from actually saying anything funny. LEE: I don't want them to be operating under any illusions. And they don't know that, even if you tell them! In fact, you spend the act telling them, sometimes, that they're not having a good time! It's like being the devil! MORRIS: You're persuading the audience that they've had a good time, when measurably, they haven't. The Daily Mail said "The whole tone is one of complete, smug condescension" and this is what they use as the show's slogan.
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is a show in which he does increasingly meta standup routines in this style, intercut with interview scenes with Chris Morris attacks him for being pretentious and brutally tears his show apart, including the interview segments he's a part of. There's a 10-minute piece in his latest standup called "I Have No Material" and at one point he stops to lecture the audience for not laughing at a joke in it he manages to be funny while explaining why he's not funny, then gets angry at the contradiction. If you like Chris Morris, watch the new season of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, he is fantastic in it.įor anyone who hasn't seen it, Stewart Lee is a comedian whose routine often involves deliberately sabotaging himself and mocking the idea of his own comedy routines.
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