Outrage as film poster for Tom Hardy's Legend makes TWO star review look like five stars

Legend film poster with Tom Hardy as the Krays

LEGEND starring Tom Hardy has hit headlines after a cheekily misleading film poster makes a bad two star review look like a five star one.

 

New film Legend famously focusses on the criminal activities of the London crimeland duo, the Krays. But a promotional poster for the new film seems to be taking the theme of dodgy doings a little bit too far.

Film critic Benjamin Lee only gave the gangster flick a paltry two stars in his scathing review in the Guardian.

Look closely at the poster, however, and the misleading layout of the images and star ratings seems to give the impression that the rest of his missing stars are simply obscured behind the heads of Hardy as both Kray brothers.

Lee himself is not best pleased and took to Twitter to voice his outrage.

 

Incredible way of making my two star review seem like I didn't hate the film pic.twitter.com/zvOyIxHQ3h

— Benjamin Lee (@benfraserlee) September 8, 2015

"Incredible way of making my two star review seem like I didn't hate the film, " he tweeted.

Thousands of Twitter users have retweeted his post.

"hahahaaa oh my god," tweeted one,while another added, 'that's dodgy as all get out."

The Telegraph film critic Robbie Collins simply tweeted " Brazen".

 

Film and theatre posters are notorious for cherry picking positive words from negative reviews and then using them out of contect.

For example, they might have extracted the word 'fascinating" from Lee's actual summary of the film when he wrote: "‘It’s a disappointingly shallow take on a fascinating period of time and leaves us sorely uninformed, as if we’ve skim-read a pamphlet. The legend might live on but Legend certainly won’t."

But this seems to be the first time that the technique has been applied to star ratings.

While most people seemed to agree with the shady nature of the ploy, there was also a consensus that it was impressive in its fiendishly clever execution.

"Deceptive: Yes. But you have to admit that was effing brilliant" tweeted one user.

 

'Was that poster your idea, Reggie?' Tom Hardy as the Krays in Legend

Legend follows the shocking story of the rise to power of the brutal Ronnie and Reggie in the 1950s and 1960s.

The film has already caused huge controversy for its portrayal of the death of Reggie's wife Frances Shea, played by Emily Browning.

A new documentary claims that the Krays' own mother, Violet, was actually behind the death, which was arranged to look like suicide.

The same film also shows contemporaries of the twins declaring that both brothers were bisexual.

Legend is out now in cinemas.