Average mob flick Legend tells a cautionary tale about marriage

The new film Legend, like most gangster movies, glamorizes depravity while making little effort to offer fresh insights into human nature. Rare for its genre, though, a woman—the kingpin’s wife Frances—narrates the film. To her detriment, Frances never sees the big picture. But viewers who survive the graphic material might discover kernels of truth about marriage and the value of wise counsel.

Legend is based on the lives of real-life gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray, identical twin brothers (both portrayed by Tom Hardy) who operated a ruthless criminal enterprise in London during the 1960s. Ronnie, by all accounts certifiably insane, flabbergasts associates with casual professions of homosexuality. Reggie is more level-headed—as far as mob bosses go. Both are quick to punish blunderers and eliminate competitors.

Frances (Emily Browning) has few prospects in London’s dreary East End. But she catches Reggie’s eye and basks in her new, glamorous life with him. She soon recognizes his occupational hazards threaten her dream of their future together. Still, she believes she can convince Reggie to put her above his business and his brother. Her mother knows better, but despite her warnings and pleas, Frances marries Reggie.

“Reggie’s promise to go straight lasted two weeks” after the wedding, Frances laments to moviegoers.

Reggie finally admits the truth to his wife and to himself: “My loyalty to my brother is how I measure myself.” But it’s a loveless and tired loyalty. Frances starts popping pills to cope with her miserable life and, later, to escape it altogether.

The Krays’ American mafia partners also pressure Reggie to ditch his increasingly unstable brother, who all but runs the organization into the ground during Reggie’s six-month prison stint. After he gets out, Reggie murders a subordinate who unsuccessfully carries out a hit ordered by Ronnie on a longtime accomplice whom Reggie trusted. Ronnie asks why.

“Because I can’t kill you, no matter how much I want to,” Reggie whispers in Ronnie’s ear.

Legend (rated R for strong violence, language throughout, and some sexual and drug material) delivers standard gangster movie fare, but the acting is stellar—especially Hardy’s. Reggie spits—and Ronnie slobbers—an unimpeachable Cockney accent (at times unintelligible to my American ear). And Hardy makes other nuanced distinctions between the two roles, like Ronnie’s slight side-to-side waddle.

The film’s production team meticulously attends to era-appropriate details, dressing actors in pompadour hairstyles and barrooms in dusky, brown paneling. The Krays’ henchmen drive a long, black Ford Galaxie 500, while a police surveillance team squeezes into a sardine can-sized Ford Anglia.

Amid the knifings and expletives, the film sneaks in an important lesson: A marriage certificate won’t change a man’s character. But even as the film closes with preternatural perspective from beyond the grave, Frances still rationalizes her and Reggie’s poor choices: “The world, like London, is not good or bad. It just is.”

That’s not what her mum tried to tell her.