MobLand is not thinking deep thoughts. That’s a compliment. Unlike, say, The Last of Us, this show about violent people doesn’t spend its runtime weeping and sweating and getting stress hives as it LarryDavidCantDecide.gif’s the morality of torture and murder. Turns out it’s not that deep. The characters on MobLand revenge-kill each other in painfully theatrically ways because they’re not good people. Simple as. Creator Ronan Bennett and his cowriter Jez Butterworth have no interest in trying to persuade you otherwise. After the carnage of this particular outing, they couldn’t if they tried.
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I’ll tell you what is good, though: Tom Hardy, action antihero. I never wanna see this actor do this kind of bang-bang shoot’em-up style stuff wearing a uniform or a badge, unless he’s explicitly playing a bad cop. As all his best roles prove, Hardy is an agent of chaos, a fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench, a pain in the ass. He shoots people to prove he means business, he uses unarmed men as human shields to open doors he knows are heavily guarded, he interrogates a man he disemboweled. The closest this man should ever get to playing a cop is if they ever need to reboot the Punisher.
And for what, by the way? For what reason is he killing a couple dozen people, creating scores of grieving wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and friends and coworkers? Why is he giving dozens of families just as much cause to launch a vendetta as the Stevensons and the Harrigans themselves have? Because he’s a Harrigan soldier, and Harrigan lives are more important, and he’s gonna kill and torture whoever he has to in order to save those Harrigans. Again, simple as. We’re not asked to understand, we’re not asked to excuse, we’re not asked to forgive. This guy’s a scumbag. It’s just that because he’s the star of the show, he’s our scumbag.
I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.
Tags: decider, mobland, TV, TV reviews