legend netflix movie review

Didn't you get the email?

By joining, you agree to the Terms and Policies and Privacy Policy and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

86% Carry-On Link to Carry-On
86% Nickel Boys Link to Nickel Boys
80% The Last Showgirl Link to The Last Showgirl

New TV Tonight

-- Laid: Season 1
-- Fast Friends: Season 1
-- Virgin River: Season 6
-- Beast Games: Season 1
-- Aaron Rodgers: Enigma: Season 1
-- The Secret Lives of Animals: Season 1

Legend Reviews

Little more than an extravagant, blood-soaked and alcohol-fueled story, Legend fulfills its title; an overinflated piece of bar room folklore better told over a cold pint of Guinness (or several).

Full Review | Aug 2, 2023

Hardy's individual performances are excellent, quite predictably, though his characters are two-dimensional at best.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 23, 2022

Hardy's performance shows off his range as an actor and is a perfect image of his acting chops. Beyond Hardy, [it] is a flawed gangster film with shifts in tone and [a familiar] plot.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2021

Legend sweeps aside the actual drama of everyday life in favor of gory exotica.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2021

Legend is chaotic, fast-paced and visually impressive, with [Tom] Hardy delivering his best performance to date.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 19, 2019

Flashy production and performances don't distract from the film's flaws, though the American Helgeland nails the minutiae of British life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 4, 2019

This is a brisk stroll through London's crime syndicate with a dual Tom Hardy performance that's worth the steep price of admission.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 1, 2019

Tom Hardy fans and Sixties aficionados should be pleased, but those seeking a really engrossing gangster story should continue the search.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Dec 7, 2018

As a double vehicle for a fantastic actor, it is worth watching.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2018

A well polished, but plodding biopic, driven by strong character performances and a well-chosen cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 22, 2018

Hardy's double performance is a joy to behold, but the film maybe doesn't quite have the conviction to make it as legendary as some would've hoped.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 11, 2018

Legend is indecently entertaining, but as an East End western it doesn't have a thought in its head other than to forgive the Krays for all their sins.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 21, 2017

Legend has all the elements of a period gangster film in place, along with dollops of additional dash and verve.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 9, 2017

For all its good looks, Legend is a let-down, hampered by the vanity of its star and by what, for British audiences, at least, feels like a Krays-lite version of a very familiar story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 26, 2017

Fans of Tom Hardy will find plenty to like, but no one else has a reason to watch this movie.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2017

[Tom] Hardy doesn't just act. He doesn't just become a screen character. He embodies the real-life personalities he is attempting to portray and ends up achieving something that warrants such adjectives as dynamic and fearless and even unforgettable.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2017

Director Brian Helgeland lays everything on with a trowel, but subtlety isn't why we're here. The flash, the violence, and Tom Hardy's twin performances make Legend a fun ride.

Full Review | Aug 14, 2017

Tom Hardy does not so much act in films as wildly devour them, drawing every last ounce of energy and audience love his way. In Legend... he sucks an entire dressing-up box towards him as well.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2017

Legend really does waste the majority of its potential, Helgeland never tapping into the story of the Kray brothers in a way that is essential or lasting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 18, 2016

Tom Hardy shines in "Legend" -- twice, in fact -- but his satisfying dual performance is the *only* thing Brian Helgeland's film has going for it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 31, 2016

UK Politics
News Videos
Paris 2024 Olympics
Rugby Union
Sport Videos
John Rentoul
Mary Dejevsky
Andrew Grice
Sean O’Grady
Photography
Theatre & Dance
Culture Videos
Fitness & Wellbeing
Food & Drink
Health & Families
Royal Family
Electric Vehicles
Car Insurance Deals
Lifestyle Videos
Home & Garden
Broadband deals
Fashion & Beauty
Travel & Outdoors
Sports & Fitness
Hotel Reviews
News & Advice
Simon Calder
Australia & New Zealand
South America
C. America & Caribbean
Middle East
Politics Explained
News Analysis
Today’s Edition
Climate 100
Sustainable Living
Climate Videos
Solar Panels
Behind The Headlines
On The Ground
Decomplicated
You Ask The Questions
Binge Watch
Travel Smart
Watch on your TV
Crosswords & Puzzles
Most Commented
Newsletters
Ask Me Anything
Virtual Events
Wine Offers
Betting Sites
Casino Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Legend, movie review: Tom Hardy is brilliant in this weird love story about the Kray twins

Brian helgeland, 131 mins, starring: tom hardy, taron egerton, emily browning, christopher eccleston, paul anderson, david thewlis.

Independent Premium

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

Tom Hardy as Ronnie (left) and Reggie Kray in new film 'Legend'

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free.

It’s the proudest day of Reggie Kray’s life. He is standing in the church, waiting for his young bride Frances to walk down the aisle. His brother Ronnie is alongside him. The bespectacled Ronnie is a little taller and more thickset than his brother. They are identical twins but we can easily tell them apart.

This is a scene from midway through Brian Helgeland’s new film. What makes the scene - and the film - so startling is that both Reggie and Ronnie are played by the same actor, Tom Hardy.

Hardy gives an utterly fascinating performances in his dual role. His Ronnie is menacing, psychotic but also comic. He can be every bit as intimidating as the actor’s uber-villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises but he also chatters away like Peter Cook gossiping with Dudley Moore in the pub in one of his Derek and Clive sketches with Dudley Moore. “I’m 'omosexual,” he tells his brother’s startled fiancée the first time he meets her in what passes with for small talk.

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. We see a couple of examples of his notorious “cigarette” punch. 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. (“An open jaw will fracture easily,” Pearson explains Reggie’s thinking.)

Legend is a biopic on a very lavish scale. The characters are British, the setting is London in the 1960s, but the film has the feel of an American gangster epic. It takes a mythologising and, at times, absurdly romantic, approach to its low-life heroes. 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.

In a bust-up in an East End pub in which Ronnie and Reggie are using hammers and knuckledusters, you can’t help but notice the incongruously artful way that Pope uses daytime light. In another scene, as we see the twins’ dour policeman nemesis Leonard “Nipper” Reid (a scowling Christopher Eccleston) prowling through the alleyways of the East End, Pope makes Bethnal Green as mysterious and labyrinthine as the Casbah.

Tom Hardy and Emily Browning as Reggie Kray and Franie Shea in Legend

Helgeland’s screenplay starts well into the Kray brothers’ criminal career. 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. Their beloved mum Violet is barely glimpsed outside one or two scenes in which she offers tea and cake to the boys. 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. 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. 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.

In the melting pot of swinging London, old class barriers are breaking down. In one telling early sequence, Reggie takes Frances into the nightclub he runs. He is greeted with deference by all the villains, minor celebrities and aristocrats who hang out there.

The sequence seems like both a self-conscious homage to the famous steadicam shot in Goodfellas and a reminder that gangsters were moving in the very highest circles. This is reinforced by the hilarious scenes in which Ronnie befriends the perverted British Tory politician Lord Boothby (John Sessions), who begins to frequent his gay parties. “Good lord, that’s Bob Boothby at an orgy,” Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Kevin McNally) almost chokes on his pipe when he is shown a newspaper with an incriminating picture. Any hopes if making political capital out of the scandal vanish when it turns out that a Labour politician, Tom Driberg, is involved too.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

The key events in the Kray story - the shooting of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar pub, the stabbing to death of Jack “The Hat” McVittie in Stoke Newington - have been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. These moments are present and correct but aren’t foregrounded. The film’s main focus is on the relationship between Reggie and Frances. It is through her eyes that she we see the brothers.

Helgeland makes it very clear that the twins had utterly different approaches toward their criminal careers. Reggie craved wealth and legitimacy. Ronnie was in it for the aggro. He very quickly grew bored unless there was violence and chaos to distract him.

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. 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. Instead, a little bizarrely, he has turned a film about Britain’s most notorious gangsters into a love story. The film foregrounds Frances, one of the least well-known characters in Kray twin history. 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. She provides the film with an emotional core it wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Legend , as its title suggests, isn’t a social realist account of Reggie, Ronnie and their misdeeds. Hardy plays both villains on a grand scale. There is some stomach churning violence here but the film portrays the Krays in a glamorised, nostalgic fashion. 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.