The Kray Brothers, Reggie and Ronnie, were such ostentatiously violent and vulgar gangsters that they practically constituted a self-parody. They were both newly in jail when the then-also-new comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus deemed to lampoon them with a sketch about “The Piranha Brothers,” Doug and Dinsdale, but the thing about that sketch, as it happened, was just how little it needed to stray from reality in order to hit the comic mark. Nevertheless, the Krays, who ruled criminal London from the late 1950s until their imprisonment in 1968, did real and wide-ranging human harm in their careers; this is a fact that Brian Helgeland, writer and director of a new crime movie about the twins, doesn’t seem to have any good ideas about what to do with. But that isn’t why “Legend” is such a muddle right off the bat.Right off the bat it’s a muddle because of Helgeland’s slavish devotion to Martin Scorsese, a bad thing to display when you don’t have Scorsese’s chops. Early on in the picture, as Reggie Kray, the relatively charming, less psychotically violent of the fellows, is courting his future wife Frances, Helgeland opts to do a little “GoodFellas.” As Reggie escorts Frances into a pub where he’s the kingpin, the moving camera follows from behind and glides alongside the couple as various friends of Reggie pay their respects. On a stage at the back, a singer is crooning “The Look of Love,” a song that had not actually been written when the scene takes place, but never mind that. You know where this is going. Helgeland wants to create his own version of the famed Copacabana tracking shot in Scorsese’s legendary 1990 gangster film, but he hasn’t quite worked out all the choreography—hence, the aforementioned singer ends up performing the world’s longest version of “The Look of Love,” at least until the point at which the sound editor or someone decided to have mercy and faded the guy out and substituted some generic-sounding movie music. This is merely one example, and a pretty outstanding one. There are plenty more throughout the film. (All of this is doubly stupefying when one recalls what a solid job Helgeland did in both writing and directing departments in his last picture, the 2013 Jackie Robinson story “42.”)
Ստյոպա Քերոբյանի բլոգ 