My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Not The Godfather, but an OK mob movie with some memorable scenes: Legend

It's not The Godfather, it's not The Sopranos, it's not Goodfellas, but for those like me who have something of a jones for mob movies Brian Helgeland's 2015  film Legend offers a pretty good fix - unique or at least unusual in a couple of ways: set in the East End of London so it's cool to see the thugs w their emulation of American mobsters (the car of choice is Lincoln Contintental, which looks especially enormous on the streets of the East End); the leads are the twin Kray brothers, so we see two different personalities at work, Reggie the smart and obviously tough mob leader and twin Ron a man with serious mental illness - in one of the first scenes they spring him from a mental hospital through dubious means - which makes him all the more frightening and scary, as he does not recognize normal boundaries of conventions of human behavior; it's based on a true London gang of the 1960s; the period details, including the music, are, as the English would have it, "spot on"; and the same actor, Tom Hardy, plays both leads, in a true tour-de-force. On the downside, the movie touches base on almost all of the conventions, or should I say cliches?: the money manager who's not quite a member of the clan and is variously attacked and defended by the insiders; the girl who marries in, deluding herself into thinking that her husband is a businessman, not a gangster; the voice-over narration (in this case, an unreliable narration, as we learn late in the film); the oblivious parents of the mobsters; the hapless cops in hopeless pursuit. So the movie's a mix, not great but worth your attention for the 2+ hours, esp for a few memorable scenes: the deal-making scene with the American mobster (Chazz Palminteri),  Reggie Kray entering prison, Ron Kray going playing solo trumpet in his nightclub, the brothers fighting each other, the xmas party.

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