Legend – Film Review

Thanks to my insurance I can earn myself free cinema tickets for being active.  I am so pleased as this means I will be going to the cinema a lot more often, it’s one of my favourite things to do.  For some of the films I go see – Especially the ones I love, I thought I would start a new series of film reviews!  The first film is Legend – I totally loved this film and included it in my favourites for September.

I’ve always enjoyed crime drama, especially gangster films.  Legend fits the bill perfectly as it’s based on the story of the notorious London gangsters the Kray twins – Ronnie and Reggie.  What’s unique about this film is both brothers are played by Tom Hardy.  Before the film I was concerned I would get confused between the characters, twins can be hard to distinguish, especially if they’re played by the same actor.  This wasn’t the case, as the characters both look different on screen, they’ re also different in their mannerisms and their voices and you can easily tell who is who.

The story itself is told from the point of view of Reggie’s wife, Frankie, played by Emily Browning.  I found Reggie a really likeable character and although him and his brother are doing illegal things, beating people up and basically are not very nice, in many ways I was routing from him throughout.

For me, Tom Hardy has a total stand out performance throughout the film.  The scenes between the brothers are gripping and there is one major fight scene between them both which must have been really hard to film.  I think there is so much mystic around the brothers it’s hard to know fact from fiction.  From reading some articles it seems as if a few things were altered but this sometimes needs to be the case to move the story forward.  I liked there was a different angle to the Kray’s story, I was expecting there to be more of Mrs Kray, the twins mother as in other things I’ve seen and read she played an integral role.  It was refreshing to see a new side to the story.

Throughout the film there were moments of laughter, frustration, anger, tragedy – You name it’s in this film.  As I said I was totally hooked from the beginning, it’s British, it’s thrilling and it’s cool.  As the poster says it’s unmissable!

If you’ve seen Legend what did you think?  Or is it a film you’d like to see?