Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

classicsoncall The DVD sleeve for "The Rise of the Krays" touts it as 'The Best British Gangster Film Ever Made', but that's a serious overstatement. Guy Ritchie did a much better job with "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". Those were fictional stories of course, but this one based on the real life Kray Brothers isn't nearly as compelling, and I was actually more enthralled by looking up a Wikipedia account of the brothers who ran an East London crime gang back in the Fifties and Sixties.The film features it's share of bloody violence as befits the subject material, though it's usually Ronnie Kray (Simon Cotton) who doles out the punishment as opposed to more self controlled brother Reggie (Kevin Leslie). The brothers eventually come to blows when Reggie prefers to make nice with fellow Italian and Maltese mobsters by carving up sections of London each gang could control, rather than waste huge amounts of money and lives fighting each other. By this time, Ronnie is so paranoid and schizophrenic that his criminal life is interrupted by a stay at a mental asylum.Without realizing there's a follow up film titled "The Fall of the Krays", I thought the picture did a disservice to it's viewers by not explaining what eventually happened with the Kray Brothers. The picture simply ends with Ronnie pondering his fate as lord and master of the London underworld. I imagine the sequel delves into their eventual arrest by the relentless detective, inspector Nipper Read (Danny Midwinter), but considering the way this was put together, I don't feel that compelled to bother with it. Of my current list of gangster films I've watched and reviewed here on IMDb, this one comes in number #75 out of 76 movies based on IMDb ranking order as I write this. That seems pretty lame for the best British gangster film ever made.

Theo Robertson Tom Hardy plays Reggie and Ronnie Kray ? Hey let's make a tie in movie and release it straight to DVD . Don't worry about developing it because the other film will market this one so it's just a case of releasing our film first That's the impression I got and THE RISE OF THE KRAYS is painfully under-developed . As the other commentators have pointed out the titular characters are played by actors who bare little resemblance to the twins . Worse than that they're not good actors either . Simon Cotton is fairly dreadful as Ronnie and resembles a not very good actor playing an East End gangster . I suppose I should be charitable and say the cast and the rest of the production team were probably under heavy pressure with deadlines but even so the poor production values are a constant distraction I can understand what director Zackary Adler tries to do with some scenes and that is to express in a cinematic style the mental illness Ronnie Kray suffers from , but considering the subject matter is an expressionistic film featuring violent gangsters really the place for a study of schizophrenia ? Probably not . Again to be charitable at least the production team don't come out with the old clichés of "Any old ladies getting mugged and he twins wanted to know about it . They stuck to their own , we were safe in those days etc etc" . The Krays are portrayed as unpleasant characters but this is also an unpleasant badly film too

sqdb I have always been interested in the Krays. I have read most of the books about them and I also enjoyed the 1990 film with the Kemp brothers, which was flawed and left a great deal of things out, but became a cult film. The Rise Of The Krays, however, makes the Kemp film look like a masterpiece in comparison. I only watched it for half an hour and I thought it was absolute rubbish. It featured violence just for the sake of it, no coherent plot, was obviously made on a shoestring and featured no actors that I had actually heard of before. To make matters even worse, the two actors playing the Krays didn't look like them at all! The comment on the cover of the DVD states that this is, apparently, "The Best British Gangster Film Ever", which is complete rubbish. This is, without doubt, the worst film I have seen for a long time and anyone who knows anything about the Krays' story would soon spot glaring mistakes. It is a blatant rip-off of the 1990 film and an obvious cash-in on the new Legend film starring Tom Hardy as the twins. He looks more like the Krays than the two jokers in this film. Honestly, just don't waste your time or money on this rubbish. If you want to know more about the Krays, then I suggest you read one of the books about them, which are infinitely more accurate and tell a fuller picture than this film. You will thank me for it, trust me. Even the 1990 film is better than this.

mrrob-31532 There is an older version of this movie starring the Kemp brothers. At least they looked alike. These two actors bore no resemblance to each other. This is a cheap movie, badly acted, not true to the story and it jumps about all over the place. There is no chronological order to the Krays growing up and developing their psychopathic behaviour. The movie was a hard watch due to the poor character development. What we have here is a very loose film based around the twins with lots of violence. The twins mother was hugely influential on the boys but we don't see her. The drunken, wife beating and child beating father also doesn't get a mention. Save yourself 2 hours and read a book or go into the garden.Hopeless.