Legend (2015) * *

Directed by:   Brian Helgeland

Starring:  Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Chazz Palmintieri, Taron Egerton, Christopher Eccleston, Paul Anderson

An actor playing dual roles is distracting.     Either one of the roles gets short shrift or you find yourself inspecting the editing when the characters appear in the same frame.     Technology has made the process seamless, but still I'm paying more attention to technical stuff than I am the performances.     It is fortunate that Legend keeps the scenes of Tom Hardy playing both Kray twins in the same shot to a minimum.    It is also unfortunate that the movie isn't all that good anyway.  

I did not see The Krays (1990), the most famous film about the violent criminal twin brothers who ruled London's crime scene in the early 1960's.     So I went into Legend with only a minimal amount of knowledge about them, which is to say I knew their names and I knew they were British.      Hardy plays Reggie, the more sensible of the twins, and Ronnie, who is psychopathic and openly gay in a time when it was still against the law in England to be gay.    I don't think anyone wanted to be the one to inform Ronnie of this fact.

Reggie being more sensible is hardly faint praise.     Don't get me wrong, he is still a violent sociopath, but he at least has enough wits about him to woo an East End girl named Frances (Browning).     Their relationship stops and starts, mostly because Reggie does a prison stretch (or is forever about to do one) while their courtship is in full bloom.      If there is anything that can kill a relationship's momentum, it is when the guy has to go away for six months to serve time on an outstanding warrant.     Reggie receives a nasty beating from the jail guards, but his revenge scene is over before we really get to see the payoff.  

Ronnie is at first locked away in a mental institution where he belongs, but thanks to not-so-subtle threats against his treating psychiatrist, Ronnie is released and the doctor pleads with Reggie to ensure Ronnie takes his two pills a day to keep him sort of level-headed.      This is tough sledding and Ronnie's insanity nearly causes a collapse in the Kray empire while Reggie is away.     The brothers have a love/hate relationship, but are loyal to each other at their peril.     The American mafia subtly muscles in to form a partnership with the Krays, but this is tenuous at best because of Ronnie's unpredictable behavior.   

Legend spends more time on Reggie's story than Ronnie's.     Ronnie is a deranged lunatic and doesn't change.     Hardy plays him with the one note he is given to play.     Reggie at least attempts to create a normal life for himself, forever making promises to Frances to go straight and then breaking them.    Frances cannot stand this life and turns to "Mother's Little Helpers" (as the Rolling Stones song calls them) to manage her dismal existence.     

Hardy is able to maintain two separate, distinct characters (which is made easier because one of them wears glasses) and does the best he can.     But Legend does not seem to have any place to go with this story.    The subplot involving the mafia is extraneous and ultimately dropped without a payoff.    The film is narrated by Frances and this reveals something that the movie thinks is a big surprise, but it really isn't.     It is part of a new narrative structure in films these days in which the narrator is seemingly alive, but in fact is dead.     Is the narrator giving us dictation from heaven?

The Krays, from the way this film plays out, are bigger in reputation and folklore than they were in real life.     They become powerful, but not Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, or Don Vito Corleone powerful.     Even at the height of their fame, they are still mid-level gangsters at best.     The title "Legend" is hardly apt for this film     Was there a need to tell this story again?