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Not the twins I was looking for
Amazon Prime put up Legend, the movie in which Tom Hardy stars as both Kray twins, and so I watched it. It has a good cast (Christopher Eccleston as the Krays' arch nemesis copper, Emily Browning as Reggie Kray's wife Frances, Colin Morgan in a minor role as Frances' brother and Reggie Kray's driver), and Hardy manages to play the twins as convincingly distinct characters, but ultimately I wasn't impressed. Probably because I've seen better takes on several aspects of the story:
Co-dependent twins played by the same actor: David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, starring Jeremy Irons, remains the gold standard. When Jeremy Irons in the subsequent year got the Oscar not for this but for his role as Claus von Bülow, he made a point of thanking David Cronenberg before the producers of the Sunny von Bülow movie, and no wonder. The twins in Dead Ringers are the far more challenging role, the direction is fabulous, and the result is intense as hell.
East end gangster in the 60s who both appall and fascinate: The Long Firm, the main character of which shares several traits with both Krays (he's got Ronnie's homosexuality and Reggie's ambitions, to name but two), as to his associates with their associates. Granted, there's a difference between what a miniseries and what a movie can do, but I still think The Long Firm did a better job all around - with the social context of the 60s, with keeping the victims of their crime lord real instead of disposable props, in refusing to draw a moral from the story, and also Mark Strong beats Tom Hardy in the acting department.
Nice girl marries gangster despite knowing he's one, life at his side turns out to be far harder than she envisioned, the idea he could quit is abandoned early on, marriage breaks apart in devastating scene where the illusion that his private self is different from his ganster self is shattered: The Godfather II. Also, may I point out that Francis Ford Coppola is no one's idea of a feminist, but he still managed to get the point across without adding rape. (The relevant Michael-Kay scene in The Godfather II is absolutely terrifying in its emotional violence without that.)
What it ultimately comes down to for me might be a matter of personal preference, though: if you advertise a movie about a twin pair of famous gangsters, I want the emotional core to be the twin relationship. Legend instead puts it on the Frances-Reggie Kray relationship, which, fair enough, but it's not what I was expecting going in, plus the few scenes in which the twins do interact on screen don't manage to sell me on the co dependence that Frances as the narrator tells me in her voice narration was there, or in fact on any type of strong relationship. Given Tatiana Maslany manages on Orphan Black to have chemistry with herself and to provide the various clones with complicated relationships with each other, and again, given that decades earlier with far more pimitive technology and the same amount of screen time David Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons also managed to make the Dead Ringer twins believable and their relationship with each other layered (far more so than the book which simply does it as good twin, bad twin) and interesting, I think it's not an unfair criticism to make, though.
Co-dependent twins played by the same actor: David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, starring Jeremy Irons, remains the gold standard. When Jeremy Irons in the subsequent year got the Oscar not for this but for his role as Claus von Bülow, he made a point of thanking David Cronenberg before the producers of the Sunny von Bülow movie, and no wonder. The twins in Dead Ringers are the far more challenging role, the direction is fabulous, and the result is intense as hell.
East end gangster in the 60s who both appall and fascinate: The Long Firm, the main character of which shares several traits with both Krays (he's got Ronnie's homosexuality and Reggie's ambitions, to name but two), as to his associates with their associates. Granted, there's a difference between what a miniseries and what a movie can do, but I still think The Long Firm did a better job all around - with the social context of the 60s, with keeping the victims of their crime lord real instead of disposable props, in refusing to draw a moral from the story, and also Mark Strong beats Tom Hardy in the acting department.
Nice girl marries gangster despite knowing he's one, life at his side turns out to be far harder than she envisioned, the idea he could quit is abandoned early on, marriage breaks apart in devastating scene where the illusion that his private self is different from his ganster self is shattered: The Godfather II. Also, may I point out that Francis Ford Coppola is no one's idea of a feminist, but he still managed to get the point across without adding rape. (The relevant Michael-Kay scene in The Godfather II is absolutely terrifying in its emotional violence without that.)
What it ultimately comes down to for me might be a matter of personal preference, though: if you advertise a movie about a twin pair of famous gangsters, I want the emotional core to be the twin relationship. Legend instead puts it on the Frances-Reggie Kray relationship, which, fair enough, but it's not what I was expecting going in, plus the few scenes in which the twins do interact on screen don't manage to sell me on the co dependence that Frances as the narrator tells me in her voice narration was there, or in fact on any type of strong relationship. Given Tatiana Maslany manages on Orphan Black to have chemistry with herself and to provide the various clones with complicated relationships with each other, and again, given that decades earlier with far more pimitive technology and the same amount of screen time David Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons also managed to make the Dead Ringer twins believable and their relationship with each other layered (far more so than the book which simply does it as good twin, bad twin) and interesting, I think it's not an unfair criticism to make, though.
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Also, have you seen the earlier film The Krays, which had the real brothers Gary and Martin Kemp (not twins, but very similar looking) in the title roles? At the time people mocked it because they were better known as musicians, but I thought they did quite well.
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