A new London-set crime show from Guy Ritchie and Top Boy writer Ronan Bennett sounds like a match made in gangland TV heaven – the gun-toting, geezer-iffic equivalent of Marvel’s The Avengers, with a lot less spandex and a great many more c-words flying about.
MobLand certainly has all the raw materials. They include Tom Hardy as a brutal underworld enforcer and Pierce Brosnan as a grizzled London-Irish godfather with a Quiet Man accent and a hairstyle that can’t decide whether it is combover or quiff. Ten minutes in, there’s already been a blizzard of swearing, a gory machine gun execution and a blood-streaked romp through a sex club soundtracked by The Prodigy’s “Firestarter”. That’s a full bingo card and the credits have hardly rolled.
Yet despite the evident enthusiasm of both Ritchie and Bennett and notwithstanding a starry cast – Helen Mirren has her fun as the Lady Macbeth-esque wife of Brosnan’s mob impresario while Paddy Considine plays their not-quite-ruthless-enough son (named Kevin) – the collaboration never hits the spot. It lacks the giddy, absurdist wit of Ritchie’s Netflix smash The Gentlemen – it is assuredly a drama, not a caper. Nor does it rise to the social commentary of Bennett’s Top Boy, which showed how crime could offer a fast track to wealth and influence to smart kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Instead, it’s a rote tale of gangsters doing gangster-esque things – with dodgy brogues flying about like bullets in a gunfight. Despite growing up in Navan, Brosnan sounds like a leprechaun who has swapped his lucky charms for a crock of ketamine. Mirren’s Irish accent, for its part, takes in the Lakes of Killarney, the Rock of Cashel and Father Ted’s Holy Stone of Clonrichert. I felt like I’d taken a road trip across Ireland without ever leaving my couch.
One problem may be that MobLand started as something else entirely. It was initially commissioned as a spin-off of the Liev Schreiber Showtime series Ray Donovan. Under the working title The Donovans, it was to tell the origin story of antihero Ray’s Irish criminal forebears. But those plans were scrapped, the project transferred from Showtime to Paramount – and suddenly, it was an all-original London-set affair, albeit with those toe-curling Plastic Paddy-isms from the initial pitch.
The plot is as ho-hum as the accents. Brosnan is Conrad Harrigan, head of the Harrigan crime family – a syndicate which has become hugely wealthy selling heroin but, driven by Conrad’s sheer greed, is now branching into fentanyl. That means encroaching on the turf of deadly rivals, the Stevensons – a clan of weaponised Del Boy types led by Richie Stevenson (a crotchety Geoff Bell).
The two criminal dynasties have never seen eye to eye. That mutual loathing spikes into the red zone when Richie’s son Tommy goes missing, having been spotted club-hopping with Conrad’s psychopathic grandson Eddie (Anson Boon, giving it the full Prince Joffrey from Game of Thrones).
There are broad hints that there is more to the relationship between Eddie and Tommy than meets the eye, and the latter’s fate is the mystery driving the early episodes. MobLand also offers a peek into the personal goings of Harrigan’s hitman-in-chief Harry Da Souza (Hardy) whose outwardly normal middle-class life with wife Jan (Joanne Froggatt) and eye-rolling teenage daughter exists in uneasy tension with his day job as Conrad’s personal attack dog.
The big star, of course, is Hardy, and it is perhaps because of his glowering presence that MobLand is such thrill-free viewing. He comes across like a human stress ball during every second of screen time. As ever with Hardy, the performance is heartfelt. Nonetheless, it seems to have constrained director Ritchie, whose direction of the opening episode is low on his usual irascibility.
Guy Ritchie has spent his career putting his distinctively playful seal on the gangland genre. Sadly, MobLand is just another tale of unpleasant people doing nasty things and is criminally short of the swagger and irreverence that have long been Ritchie’s hallmarks. Even at his lowest moments – let us recall his Madonna desert island romcom Swept Away and shudder – he could be relied upon to conjure an infectious sense of fun. MobLand finds the director doing something he has never previously attempted; trying our patience.
