Seeing double

ONE-TWO PUNCH. Hardy portrays the Kray twins in “Legend.”

IF YOU crave something edgier after the shallowness of the Metro Manila Film Festival’s entries, you can’t go wrong with Brian Helgeland’s true-to-life crime thriller, “Legend”—about the rise and fall of notorious former boxer Reggie Kray and his psychologically unhinged twin brother, Ronald, who rose to criminal prominence and notoriety in 1960s London.

Both roles are portrayed with gimlet-eyed precision and stunning insight by the formidable Tom Hardy. The film is gritty and absorbing, but is weighed down by heavily accented dialogue—at least for people unfamiliar with Cockney—that gets in the way of its narrative clarity.

If you can get past this “incomprehensible” distraction, however, it isn’t hard to get blown away by Hardy’s disturbingly immersive portrayals—a knockout punch that showcases the actor’s textured thespic “shuttling!”

It’s always a treat to see Hardy transform and “vanish” into the characters he essays onscreen:

He was Mad Max in George Miller’s “Fury Road,” Batman’s back-breaking adversary, Bane, in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” a hard-hitting pugilist in “Warrior,” and the murderous fur trapper who betrays Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wince-inducing period drama, “The Revenant,” showing on Feb. 3—mark your calendar!