A year ago Guy Ritchie brought us the Netflix series The Gentlemen, and now here he is on Paramount+ with his latest romp through the verdant pastures of criminal low-lifery. It seems that top thespians are queueing up to bag a slice of Ritchie-world, and an impressive cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren.
To add a bit of extra lustre, screenwriting duties have been handled by Ronan Top Boy Bennett, with a bit of help from Jez Butterworth in episode one.
Ritchie, a bit of a posh boy who likes slumming it, remains fascinated by the underworld/highlife divide. Thus we have Brosnan’s Conrad Harrigan enjoying the spoils of his drug-dealing operation amid the baronial splendour of his Cotswolds mansion, where the chatelaine is his wife Maeve (Helen Mirren, pictured below with Brosnan). Both Harrigans are equipped with music-hall Irish accents, which doesn’t prevent us from gathering that it may well be the calculating Maeve who is the power behind the Harrigan dynasty. She even keeps a private stash of coke inside her bra.
Country piles aside, much of the action takes place in East London and the City, depicted in almost documentary-style grittiness. The plot starts rolling via a raucous scene in a nightclub, where Eddie Harrigan (Anson Boon) is enjoying a riotous night out with three of his mates. They’re flashy, loud and armed with wads of cash, and nauseatingly arrogant Eddie seems to think he’s the king of the world. It all goes pear-shaped when Eddie gets into a scuffle with another punter, and unhesitatingly plunges a knife into him. Then he and his mates flee into the night.
It’s here that Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy) comes into his own. Harry is Conrad’s fixer and enforcer, and we’ve already seen him in action when he supervises a peace conference of rival gangsters and tries to get everyone to shake hands. But when Conrad announces that it’s “pruning time”, Harry machine-guns all the guests instead.
Hardy is enjoying himself a lot, laying down the law in a voice which barely rises above a whisper, and tirelessly carrying out the latest outlandish commands from his boss. Visiting the knife victim in hospital and calmly explaining what will happen to him if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut is one of the more mundane chores in Harry’s day. However, a rather more serious issue raises its head when it transpires that Tommy, one of Eddie’s companions from the nightclub episode, has vanished without trace. Tommy’s dad, Richie Stevenson (a loathsomely Kray-ish Geoff Bell), is steaming with rage. He wants answers and somebody’s head will be on a plate if his boy isn’t found.
Oodles of chaos, violence and mayhem lie in store, but en route there is plenty of incidental scenery to savour. MobLand has a cast which is rather better than it deserves, including Joanne Froggatt as Harry’s wife Jan (who wants Harry to join her in couples therapy), Paddy Considine as Conrad’s son and Eddie’s father Kevin Harrigan, and a very businesslike Lara Pulver as Kevin’s wife Bella (Froggatt and Pulver pictured above). In fact it might be quite helpful if they put a family tree up on the screen from time to time, so we can keep up with who is supposed to be related to whom.
This isn’t peak Ritchie, but if you like cartoon gangsters and slapstick violence, climb aboard.
- New episodes of MobLand are released every Sunday on Paramount+
- More TV on theartsdesk
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