Playing a gangster is apparently an offer no actor can refuse—because how else to explain so many talented people involving themselves in MobLand?
Created by The Day of the Jackal’s Ronan Bennett, and partly directed by Guy Ritchie, this Paramount+ crime saga reeks of regurgitation, throwing up so many underworld clichés that it proves difficult to stomach.
Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and Paddy Considine are predictably captivating as its chief criminals, but at least on the basis of its first two episodes, it’s a whole lot of stale plotting and humdrum posturing. (The series premieres March 30.)
In a restaurant kitchen, Harry Da Souza (Hardy) attempts to negotiate peace between at-odds gang leaders. This doesn’t go as well as he’d like, and when he reports back to his crime family boss Conrad Harrigan (Brosnan), he’s told that in every orchard, “You plant the trees. The trees grow tall. Then sooner or later, they begin to get mangled, and before you know it, the apples start to rot—and that, Harry, my son, is pruning time.”
Harry understands what this coded message means and, with his underlings Zosia (Jasmine Jobson) and Kiko (Antonio Gonzalez Guerrero), he guns down both factions, thereby settling the issue once and for all.
MobLand doesn’t have an original bone in its sturdy body, but it’s occasionally embellished by unique British slang, as when Conrad and Harry use the term “grass” to refer to a snitch.
Save for those brief touches, however, the series spins a hackneyed yarn about gangland rivalries and the familial tensions which complicate them. Conrad thinks that expanding his empire necessitates getting into the fentanyl business, and he’s aware that this puts him on a collision course with foe Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell), who presently controls the trade.
While war isn’t desirable, Conrad wants to keep his enterprise on its current roll. Nonetheless, his plans are muddled by his grandson Eddie (Anson Boon), a hothead with a taste for cocaine who stabs a man at a nightclub that only plays The Prodigy’s “Firestarter.” This assault is almost as troublesome as the fact that Eddie was accompanied by Richie’s grandson Tommy (Felix Edwards), with whom he’s not supposed to be friends, and who in the aftermath of this melee goes mysteriously missing.
Harry is a more overtly intimidating version of Harvey Keitel’s Pulp Fiction cleaner, and Conrad tasks him with both guaranteeing that Eddie’s victim (who survived) doesn’t squeal to the cops, and smoothing things out with Richie, who suspects that Eddie—as the last person to see Tommy—knows his boy’s whereabouts.
This results in multiple chats between Harry and Richie in which they glare at and try to intimidate each other, as well as make scary demands and set hard deadlines. Without raising his voice, Hardy radiates such menace that MobLand is suitably intense, and yet his character has been envisioned in painfully unimaginative form, including his difficulties with wife Jan (Joanne Froggatt), who’s fed up with her spouse putting work ahead of her and their teen daughter Gina, and who wants him to attend couples counseling as a last chance to save their marriage.
Despite Ritchie helming MobLand’s maiden two installments, there’s scant sign of his trademark flair; without his name appearing in the opening credits (and promotional materials), it would be impossible to guess that he was behind the camera.
The show is blandly sleek and its performances are similarly attractive and dull, led by Brosnan as an Irish bigwig who—as evidenced by the way he carries himself around his manor house and estate—likes to fancy himself an English gentleman.
As Conrad’s eldest son (and Eddie’s dad) Kevin, Paddy Considine makes no meaningful impression, which is a damning indictment of the proceedings. Only Mirren stands out as Conrad’s wife Maeve, and that’s because she goes full dragon-lady evil as the scheming power behind the Harrigan throne—to the point that, regardless of her relatives’ handwringing over Eddie, she embraces the kid as a genuine chip off the old psycho-Harrigan block.
There are other threads in MobLand, from Kevin’s wife Bella (Lara Pulver) brokering a shady deal between a Frenchman and her politico father—and striving to woo Harry—to Conrad’s other son Brendan (Daniel Betts) endeavoring to get back into his dad’s good graces via a partnership with his half-sister Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon), whom he awkwardly praises as “quite fit.”
Maeve suspects that Conrad’s long-time best friend Archie (Alex Jennings) may be double-crossing them, and her ability to manipulate her husband into doing her bidding creates a mess that, as usual, Harry is tasked with tidying up. Car chases, shootouts, and Harry beating a few truculent guys to a pulp provide the action. Yet even in these violent clashes, there’s zero fear that anyone is going to perish save for the protagonists’ faceless adversaries.
MobLand may very well develop into something uniquely surprising and suspenseful, but its opening salvo suggests that it’s content to color inside well-established genre lines. These are types that have been seen before, doing rote things in order to maintain their standard-issue illicit syndicates, and if that weren’t depressing on its own, it’s doubly so considering that the series boasts such a wealth of talent.
To cast Hardy as a jack-of-all-trades mobster and then deny him any idiosyncratic personality is a monumental missed opportunity. The same holds, to a lesser extent, with his illustrious compatriots, all of whom come across as too good for this imitative material, which is lowlighted by a baffling scene in which a SWAT team breaks into Harry’s home to arrest him even though they don’t suspect him of, or plan on charging him with, a crime.
Perhaps Harry will ultimately find himself in a Yojimbo scenario, compelled to pit Conrad and Richie against each other for his own gain. Or maybe he’ll be forced to take outrageously drastic action to maintain gangland order and keep himself and his clan safe. For now, however, MobLand seems headed down a familiar path—and, if so, toward an early grave.
