In the new version of the Kray twins story, the notorious gangsters spring to life fully formed. They're not yet the undisputed rulers of London, but they're plainly in the ascendancy, already rubbing out rivals and spurning the overtures of blokes from Las Vegas whose names end in vowels.
Thus we are mercifully spared the childhood scenes of the boilerplate biopic. The problem is that the twins are never explained: their psychopathically fearless brutality; their almost endearing indifference to authority, even when they are arrested and imprisoned; their passionate lifelong dedication to nurturing the near-mythical status referred to in the film's title; all these seem like accoutrements rather than the essence of character.
To be fair to writer-director Helgeland, the omission is doubtless deliberate. He would have been delighted to hear, as I did, someone say as they left the preview screening, "I've never found violence so enjoyable", because he's made something like a live-action cartoon (in an East End visualised by Disneyland), albeit one in which people who've been stomped don't shake themselves and pop back to life.
The film positively exults in its brutality, which is perhaps unsurprising considering its source material: John Pearson's tellingly-titled 1995 The Profession of Violence reads like a rather distasteful hagiography dressed up in the kind of psychoanalysis you buy in the $2 shop. You'll need to look elsewhere for any sense of what made these boys tick, perhaps to Peter Medak's floridly Freudian 1990 film The Krays, with Spandau Ballet's Kemp twins, Gary and Martin.
