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.

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

Helgeland uses long-take shots through boisterous clubs, unreliable narration and splashes of violence to create a drama of little surprise and even less impact.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 4, 2015

It's not short of thrills, the biggest of which is Hardy's double performance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 3, 2015

Watching Tom Hardy nearly upstage himself in the gangster biopic Legend makes for mesmerizing viewing. It's also an object lesson in how great acting can transcend a film's limitations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 3, 2015

The movie's a testament to the Krays' ability to get away with everything - for a while, anyway. But it's better evidence of Tom Hardy's ability to do just about anything.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 25, 2015

Hardy's performance - nay, performances - are so electrifying they cut through the confusion. Watch "Legend" for him and him alone. He's great, times two.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 25, 2015

Brian Helgeland, following up on his impressive Jackie Robinson biopic 42, never seems quite at home in old Blighty, but he delivers a thorough, nicely paced treatment of the brothers' rise and fall.

| Nov 25, 2015

Legend is a bad title for a film that doesn't quite succeed in relating how these brothers became legends.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 25, 2015

Writer-director Brian Helgeland gives us violence without felt menace, doomed romance without felt desperation, and decadence without felt pleasure.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 25, 2015

"Legend" could serve as a kind of greatest-hits collection for the best actor working today. Unfortunately, it's also supposed to serve as a movie proper, and that's where it falls short.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 25, 2015

Two Tom Hardys for the price of one certainly sounds like a steal of a deal. But if this movie makes it into his future highlight reel, it'll be for level of difficulty, not because the film itself has made much of a bid for posterity.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 25, 2015

It leaves a big blank - make that two blanks - where the complex, contradictory lives behind this "Legend" should be.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 24, 2015

Helgeland clearly has a feel for the Krays' criminal milieu, but it's not long before repetition sets in. There's only so much brutality that even the most bloodthirsty audience can tolerate.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 24, 2015

To take such a subject and render it without focus, interest, or joy-to make a long, dull movie from it - qualified as some perverse sort of achievement.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 24, 2015

In what is surely his finest hour to date, Tom Hardy plays both brothers. Much more than a gimmick, it's like watching one side of a mind wrestle with the other -- literally, in one explosive, fun-to-unpack fight scene.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 24, 2015

Tom Hardy's the only punch to an otherwise standard gangster saga more interested in playboy panache than stick-to-your-ribs nastiness.

| Nov 23, 2015

His fifth and most assured film as both writer and director, Legend is not the work of a dedicated stylist, but of a strong storyteller who, like Lawrence Kasdan in the Eighties and Nineties, creates clean, precise images.

| Nov 20, 2015

As a character study, it proves about as deep as Goofus and Gallant in the British underworld, but it's also consistently fun to watch.

| Nov 19, 2015

A tremendous effort by Hardy is let down by unfocused storytelling.

| Nov 19, 2015

Legend's central cinematic ploy, the doubling of Hardy ... gives this mostly predictable retelling a jolt of anarchy in the U.K.

| Nov 19, 2015