Peter Medak’s The Krays is worth seeing for the Kemp brothers and Billie Whitelaw, who make its family scenes unsettling. The performances hold our attention when the psychology grows repetitive and the criminal threat feels remote.
Peter Medak’s The Krays is worth seeing for its uncomfortable attention to family life and the performances that make it credible. Philip Ridley’s screenplay treats the brothers’ devotion to their mother as central to understanding them, rather than an incidental detail in a criminal biography. That gives Medak something more interesting to explore than the usual gangster self-importance. It also creates the film’s chief limitation: the same explanation keeps returning when we need to learn something else about these men.
Gary Kemp plays Ronald and Martin Kemp plays Reggie, and both understand the value of not doing too much. Their stillness discourages the easy enjoyment that a swaggering gangster performance can offer, without making either man consistently frightening. Gary is particularly effective at making a blank expression seem deliberate, as though Ronald has no reason to explain himself to anyone else. There are stretches when that restraint becomes merely flat, but both actors hold our attention without needing to advertise how dangerous their characters are.
Billie Whitelaw’s Violet gives those performances someone to respond to, and the film becomes sharper around her. We were unsettled by the twins’ devotion to their mother. Whitelaw makes Violet’s authority so credible that the brothers’ attachment feels ordinary within the family, even as it makes their behaviour outside it harder to take. She does not need to compete with the men’s violence to command our attention. The domestic scenes provide the strongest reason to keep watching.
Alex Thomson’s cinematography helps sustain Medak’s eerie mood, though the polished presentation of violence sometimes draws attention away from its ugliness. The images are so carefully considered that the brutality can seem safely contained within them. Michael Kamen’s music suits this sombre approach without doing enough to sharpen the threat. Taken together, the photography and music make the film persistently uneasy, but that consistency becomes tiring when so little changes in the way a scene affects us.
Martin Walsh’s editing does too little to vary the film’s increasingly repetitive rhythm. Once the family relationships are established, too many passages seem to confirm what we already understand about them. At 119 minutes, that becomes a substantial weakness, particularly when Ridley’s psychological explanations start making the brothers seem simpler rather than more comprehensible. Devotion to a mother can tell us something about a violent man without accounting for everything he does. The script puts too much responsibility on Violet, and even Whitelaw cannot make every implication convincing.
Against the gangster film’s familiar pleasures, Medak’s reluctance to make the brothers enjoyable company is welcome. There is no need for a crime film to send us away quoting its criminals, and the Kemps’ guarded performances resist that temptation. But fear ought to replace the missing charm, and here it arrives unevenly; the family scenes can disturb more than the violence. For those interested in crime drama, there is enough here to justify the evening. Go for Whitelaw, and allow for a film that takes longer than it should to make its point.
