MobLand review: Tom Hardy’s London gang drama offers nothing new

Ten years ago, if Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan were headlining a series with Guy Ritchie attached to direct, it would a big freaking deal.

Of course, 10 years ago, Guy Ritchie hadn’t spent the past decade lurching from one rubbish project to a mediocre one and back again. Maybe that’s unfair, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was surprisingly mostly watchable.

If you’re creating a series about London gangsters and it’ll feature a lot of mobsters quietly issuing threats of dismemberment and general unpleasantness, you might think Ritchie was a coop.

But he’s been making the same thing since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the schtick is tired. In the case of MobLand, he’s a liability and not an asset, although it’s hard to tell how much of it is Ritchie, and how much of it is creator Ronan Bennett and writer Jez Butterworth. TV is traditionally more of a writers’ medium.

MobLand isn’t bad per se, but it is indistinct, another forgettable drama about bad guys trying to be badder and more fearsome than the other crooks they’re battling. They scheme and glare, wear dark colours, someone will inevitably pull out a flat cap, and mumble barely veiled threats in that specific vernacular.

Speaking of mumbling, someone needs to check the sound mix on MobLand. Hardy famously isn’t a fan of enunciating and now they’ve got Brosnan doing a sort-of Irish accent you can barely discern.

Yes, we know Brosnan is Irish but apparently he hasn’t used his native brogue in so long he had to really work to get it back — he hasn’t fully succeeded — while Mirren too sounds distracting. All of this has the effect of bumping you out, so frustrated you may have to, shock horror, turn on the captions.

Not that it’s as bad as Brad Pitt’s accent in Snatch. Ooph. Never forget.

The lack of audio coherence is the most memorable thing about MobLand, an otherwise dull show full of tropes and familiar beats. It’s not terrible or laughable at playing out this story, it’s just we’ve seen it before. There is, of course, a scene in a boxing gym. Be sure to stamp your bingo card!

How many more times must we be asked to care about rival gangs tussling for the fentanyl trade while casually dispatching nameless goons as if they didn’t have a life and a context? Are audiences really still into this?

The central character is Harry Da Souza (Hardy), a professional fixer for the Harrigan crime family. He’s smart at what he does, both unassuming and effective, and is put in a bind when the spoilt adult scions of the Harrigans and their rival, the Stevensons, go out partying together.

After copious cocaine or ketamine bumps, the young Harrigan twat, Eddie (Anson Boon), stabs someone in a club, for funsies, we guess, and Harry has to clean up the mess. In the aftermath, the Stevenson patriarch (Geoff Bell) discovers his son hasn’t returned home and there’s CCTV that puts him with Eddie Harrigan.

Uh oh, how will a gang war be avoided?

On the Harrigan side, Brosnan’s Conrad is ostensibly calling the shots but the real power is Mirren’s Maeve, who can easily manipulate her husband. She is an unhinged character, holding her grandson Eddie to her bosom (figuratively and literally), and telling him how proud she is that he stabbed some rando, before rewarding him with a baggie of coke. As you do.

Two episodes were made available for review, both directed by Ritchie, so there’s certainly the potential that this series could turn around and become appointment viewing, if nothing because Hardy, for all his mumbling, is quite appealing. It’s just that innate presence he has.

But the show itself is nothing special, a stale gangster story with nothing new to offer. Maybe someone with a fresher eye and sensibility than Ritchie could’ve brought more energy to the table.

MobLand is on Paramount+ with new episodes weekly on Sundays