I dug a great deal of this and I almost gave this a bit of a higher rating. Tom Hardy is absolutely fantastic and award-worthy here, delivering one of his best performances (or rather set of performances). Both of these characters are fascinating and it's sensational to watch him shift between their two personas (the more rationalizing Reggie and the borderline psychotic Ronnie). I particularly loved his work as Ronnie and the facial expressions he used to express that character's inner spirit were intense. The movie around them is solid, if workmanlike, and I do think it tries to accomplish a bit too much without having a ton of story to back it up. Visually it's great and it has a lighter tone than a lot of crime films of this sort. But by the end it definitely begins to drag a bit and I think about 10-20 minutes could have been excised. Also Emily Browning, while more tolerable here than she has been in the past, is completely miscast here as the female lead and I never really bought her character's downward spiral (or fully understood why she was narrating the story in the first place). Still, this is much more enjoyable than the similarly themed Black Mass. B

Better than Black Mass, yeah, but plagued by some of its issues still. The first hour is great. Hardy is great. But the film goes downhill about halway in and never recoers.

Is Taron Egerton in it much?

Hmm, about 10-15 minutes. Doesn't get much to do. He plays one of Tom Hardy's gay lovers.

He's in the background of a lot of scenes

It's not bad but at 130 minutes, it is too long. Especially as it's quite uneventful. It's not really about anything, more just a chain of events as to how they didn't get caught for so long. But no central plot to maintain a high investment. If it was shorter, this format wouldn't seem like such a sit. Most of the film follows this pattern: One Kray does a bad thing, other one forgives him under "he's my brother" reasoning, other Kray does a bad thing, same forgiveness and same reasoning, repeat.

Hardy did ok. Not much violence either for a supposed gangster movie. One could argue that it's pretty much a biopic of Reggie and Frances, not the Kray brothers. Also, I really never liked the title of this film and still don't really know why it was called Legend. There are a million better titles.

I remember liking this quite a bit. It was definitely way too long, but I did enjoy Hardy's performance as the twins. Payback is still my favorite and arguably Helgeland's best film IMO.

He hasn't really made many films. Payback is obviously his best work, though he wrote Assassins and Green Zone, both of which are fantastic.