Guy Ritchie is well and truly pivoting into TV. Following the success of Netflix’s The Gentlemen, the Snatch and Sherlock Holmes director has doubled down on his foray away from film with MobLand, a grisly gangster drama coming this weekend to Paramount+.
And it’s got an all-star cast, with Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan top of the billing. Hardy plays Harry da Souza, the “fixer” for Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan’s ruthless Irish crime family, the Harrigans. Brosnan is patriarch Conrad Harrigan, an Irish gangster done good, and Mirren is matriarch Maeve Harrigan, who’s more interested in Succession-level scheming than she is in being a traditional mob wife.
There’s also Paddy Considine, who plays Kevin, one of Conrad’s myriad difficult spawn, and Lara Pulver stars as Bella, his chic, secretive wife.
The story kicks off when Kevin and Bella’s unruly son Eddie (Anson Boone) unsettles the peace by going on a night out with a fellow gangster nepo-baby, Tommy Stevenson. His father, Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell) already hates the Harrigans and would use any excuse to try and topple them. The two boys get up to no good while visiting an East London nightclub (the staging for which is FOLD in Canning Town, for those familiar) and end up getting into a scuffle. That night, Tommy goes missing, and his appearance threatens to unleash all out war between the Harrigans and Stevensons.
In typical Guy Ritchie fashion, the ensuing madness involves plenty of car chases, cocaine binges and dismembered bodies, plus a heap of cockney accents and some choice gags about penises. It struggles to establish itself as anything new or different from what we’ve already seen from Ritchie, especially when The Gentlemen landed with such aplomb. It almost feels as though it’s Guy Ritchie adapted for an American audience – dumbed down, hammed up, repeating old stereotypes.
That being said, Tom Hardy is deeply enjoyable as a rational, organised mob fixer - the type of guy to offer you a cup of tea before he waterboards you - and it’s hard to imagine it being played quite as well by anyone else. Mirren is deliciously commanding, and seeing her playing the type of woman who issues death orders at the drop of a hat and does lines of coke with her grandson is deeply enjoyable.
The same cannot be said for other members of the cast. While it’s great fun to see Brosnan on screen in this kind of role, his rogue Irish accent (which gets even more rogue when you remember Brosnan is actually Irish himself) proves to be quite the distraction and any real threat he poses is completely obscured by the way he insists on rolling his r’s with each sentence. Maybe it’s a regional dialect that people will misunderstand as a bad accent, like Jason Isaacs in The White Lotus. But maybe it’s not.
The plot is rich and exciting, but there are so many side characters introduced as part of the Harrigan’s dynasty that you often get tired of being sidetracked from seeing Tom Hardy whip out his knuckleduster and just go to town. In an ideal world it would be tightly focused on Hardy, Mirren, Brosnan (sans accent) and Boone, and the plot would feel a lot more watertight. But it’s called MobLand, not Mob Inner Circle, after all, so I guess things have to get a little wider than that.
Overall, the series is a silly, grizzly jaunt, in typical Guy Ritchie fashion, and some of the stars are an absolute hoot. The trouble is that other than a few entertaining performances and a well placed Fontaines DC opening track, it’s really nothing new.
MobLand is streaming on Paramount+ from March 30
