williamford-17805

Many films set out to bring a compelling idea to life and fall short. This film apparently never had an idea at all, other than "let's do a Kray brothers film". Zero creative spark, zero idea of how to actually make it a story worth telling.

There's no real plot to speak of, just a series of barely connected scenes, none of which are particularly interesting. Both the romance and the crime stories are played-out, boring and cliché-ridden. By the end, it became clear there was no point to any of it. The style is a transparent ripoff of Scorcese but with none of the elements that make his films compelling.

Tom Hardy puts in a dependably-okay double performance, but no actor could have salvaged a script this hollow. There are no sympathetic characters to root for. The Krays are loathsome scum from start to finish, and while the film tries to make us to like them by contrasting them as being somehow honest compared to the high-society hypocrites, it's nowhere near enough to make up for the fact that these Krays are one-dimensional, boring characters with no redeeming qualities or charisma.

The WAGish female lead is little more than a smiley airhead who goes from knowing from the start that Ronnie is a gangster, spending years justifying being with a gangster, to leaving him because he turned out to be... a gangster.

As a result, the conclusions of the various plotlines have no emotional impact whatsoever. The film completely fails to give us any reason to care what happens to any of its characters. The mawkish, cringeworthy narration throughout and particularly at the end of the film, adds a particularly stinky topping to the mess that this film really was.

Historically the BBC has done a tremendous job with conflict documentaries, clearly and grippingly covering the causes, preogression, and dynamic of major contemporary wars. Their docs on the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War are exemplary, so I went in to this expecting more of the same. What a shame.

Unfortunately, the team that was placed in charge of making this documentary was either not up to the job, leant upon by the government for political considerations, or most likely both. Many of the most important events and dynamics of the war are not even touched upon. Unbelievably, there is not a single word spoken about the Kurds of Rojava or the KRG, Kobani, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the events in Iraq that boosted and degraded ISIS and brought Western powers to intervene in Syria, nor about Turkey's campaign against the Kurds, its confrontations with Russia, or other operations.

Meanwhile, some of the most poisonous and blatant propagandists from the Syrian, Russian and Saudi regimes are given cosy interviews in which their ridiculous lies go uncontested. Lyse Doucet can be commended for her work reporting from the frontlines, but she is simply too weak, too deferent, and too spineless for the task of holding the spokespeople of these regimes to acccount. It is excruciating to watch, muddles the documentary's presentation of the facts, and makes it complicit in their propaganda by allowing them to delude the viewers with their lies, unchallenged. What an insult to the victims of these regimes. Pathetic.

A massive missed opportunity to make a comprehensive documentary that explained this conflict to viewers with clarity.