Badly acted and innacurate with the world's most inappropriate film score! (The Krays (DVD))

Member Name: dangaroo

Product:	The Krays (DVD)
Date:	03/05/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very few!

Disadvantages: Poor acting, story is a mess, focuses on dull parts too much

I like many other people have always been interested in criminals and in particular gangsters of the past. The name in the UK which sticks out the most, due to their celebrity lifestyles in the 60s is The Krays. Like many London Eastenders, The Krays were from Irish and Jewish stock, the film briefly shows some of the background, i.e. a small scene from the war, one at a hospital and one at a school - not enough to go on though and what is there, is poorly acted out. Unfortunately this seems to set the mould for the rest of the film. It's neither an accurate biographical attempt nor a thrilling crime film in its own right. It is very mediocre throughout and often seems to compelely ignore some of the more exciting or brutal parts that could be added such as getting Frank Mitchell out of Broadmoor being unable to cope with him and killing him.

It focuses far too much on unimportant things and jumps about from one event to the other without showing how something was done, if it was improved it would also need to be a bit longer in my eyes. Another major fault is the lack of Charlie Kray in it (who disowned the film as tripe). A lot of the actors, I find annoying in it - although I do think that Kate Hardie's depiction of Reggie's wife Frances being pushed over the edge by Reggie's fame and cruelty, is reasonably good (but very annoying! Jack the Hat McVittie is hillarious and well acted out by Tom Bell - so much so, that you don't want him to die!

The Kemp brothers are far from convincing as The Krays, their mother Violet and Aunt Rose are depicted as mad feminists. Despite a few gorey scenes, it seems far too tame for a firm who dominated the London underworld for quite some time and were involved in sorts of crimes. It's just about watchable but it's pretty cheesy and just relatively awful at times. The Krays are an interesting topic and there's tonnes of decent documentaries about them but this film is just very poor indeed. If anything needs a re-make, it is this!

Oh and one last thing - the film score is awful, made up of piano heavy horror b-movie like music and for what reason, I don't know at all!

Summary: Pretty poor film!