Review – The Krays

Here’s a rarity: a film about mobsters that features no major characters of Sicilian or Asian origin. Instead our subject (make that subjects ... twin subjects, to be precise) is the notorious Kray brothers, psychopathic bosses of much of the London underworld a few decades back. The history’s pretty accurate (at least as far as I know, inasmuch as I’m not an in-depth expert on the Krays), and the attention to detail is also nice. There’s no pretension that these guys are Michael-Corleone-good-father-wannabes, or even that they were nice people, which they weren’t (Monty Python fans may recall them being lampooned as the terrifying Piranha brothers). Still, they’re played with a certain amount of sympathy, making them excellent examples of the purest form of the anti-hero. And an interesting side-note: Ronnie Kray was gay, a fact that the movie makes no attempt to conceal. I’ve seen this film a couple of times with other people around, and both times the scene with Ronnie in bed with his significant other produced extreme reactions from male members of the audience. When I saw it for the first time in a theater, a frat-boy-looking guy and his girlfriend got up and left at his behest. And when I watched it with a group of friends and acquaintances, one guy protested over and over that “I wouldn’t wanna sleep with no man” (of course he didn’t say “sleep with,” but you get the idea). So why is it that guys with latent homosexual panic can cope with gay characters in comedies, or even dramas, but not when an action hero (even as dubious a “hero” as Ronnie Kray) turns out to be sexually attracted to other men? Something to think about. Worth seeing