#Legend tom hardy imdb full
Now, years after the film's release, the full story of that feud has come to light. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller explained that after the events of 9/11, "the American dollar collapsed against the Australian dollar, the budget ballooned, and it fell apart." Ultimately, the Mad Max of the new millennium was postponed and wouldn't resurface until 2015, with Mad Max: Fury Road.īut in the lead-up to Fury Road, rumors started swirling about disagreements and a possible feud between the two lead actors, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. In reality, visionary writer/director George Miller began planning a fourth installment as early as 1997, and the film was set to begin pre-production in 2001. The Road Warrior), following just two years later, this Australian vision of a post-apocalyptic world ruled by roaming biker gangs and cruel tyrants found international success.Īfter the third entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, was released in 1985, the franchise seemingly came to an abrupt halt. 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.Back in 1979, the first Mad Max exploded onto the low-budget indie film landscape and ignited an adrenaline-filled, action-packed franchise. There is some stomach churning violence here but the film portrays the Krays in a glamorised, nostalgic fashion. Hardy plays both villains on a grand scale. Legend, as its title suggests, isn’t a social realist account of Reggie, Ronnie and their misdeeds. She provides the film with an emotional core it wouldn’t otherwise have had.
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. The film foregrounds Frances, one of the least well-known characters in Kray twin history. Instead, a little bizarrely, he has turned a film about Britain’s most notorious gangsters into a love story.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Their beloved mum Violet is barely glimpsed outside one or two scenes in which she offers tea and cake to the boys. 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. Helgeland’s screenplay starts well into the Kray brothers’ criminal career. Tom Hardy and Emily Browning as Reggie Kray and Franie Shea in Legend 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. It takes a mythologising and, at times, absurdly romantic, approach to its low-life heroes.
The characters are British, the setting is London in the 1960s, but the film has the feel of an American gangster epic.
Legend is a biopic on a very lavish scale. (“An open jaw will fracture easily,” Pearson explains Reggie’s thinking.) 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. We see a couple of examples of his notorious “cigarette” punch. 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.