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.

MobLand isn’t swinging for the fences or plumbing the depths, but it’s not trying to be The Sopranos and failing, it’s trying to be a show in which a bunch of cool attractive people bark orders or dodge bullets, with Tom Hardy’s deadpan machismo as its center of gravity. It’s easy as pie to assemble a great cast, write a big genre piece for them to perform, and call it a day, counting on familiar beats and familiar faces to carry the project. It’s much harder to do this well. (Does anyone else remember Zero Day?) 

On the big screen, there’s a reason Conclave last year and Sinners this year caught on the way they did: big beautiful costumey pulse-pounding thrillers starring beloved actors that actually work are rarer these days than hen’s teeth. Both of those films are a sight more serious-minded than MobLand has shown itself to be, but the principle remains the same here. There’s a lot of unclaimed territory between tenderloin steak and fast-food franchise crap. Sometimes people just want to eat a goddamn burger. Give it to them!

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

There are no bloody stabbings in this episode, no fight scenes, no gun battles. The only pyrotechnics to speak of — I mean, other than the car bombing — come from the tension between the Stevensons and the Harrigans, embodied in the gritted-teeth determination projected by actors Geoff Bell and Pierce Brosnan as their respective bosses. Tom Hardy remains excellent as a man who doesn’t necessarily always stay cool, but does alway stay under control. Helen Mirren is having a ball as Maeve grows increasingly ambitious and unhinged. As he did on House of the Dragon, Paddy Considine excels as a guy who’s doing a basically okay job as a figure of importance but who’d probably be better suited doing literally everything else. 

And director Daniel Syrkin peppers the thing with the occasional lovely vista: Conrad fishing as night falls over his country house, Harry on his balcony looking out over the nighttime city. The Fontaines D.C. theme song, “Starburster,” whips ass. In short, MobLand is good gangster TV.

I reviewed this week’s MobLand for Decider.

It occurs to me now that Harry is a Mike Ehrmantraut, as in the similarly employed cartel fixer from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Played by Jonathan Banks with the same kind of seen-it-all sad-sack professionalism Tom Hardy brings to Harry, he’s a character far more likeable than the things he does would lead you believe if you heard about them in a vacuum. Harry is a huge piece of shit, but he’s also Tom Hardy, making the most of his natural gift of coming across like a hard man with a heart of caramel. In wrestling parlance, he’s a tweener, a guy with heel tendencies who’s treated like a face by the audience. You want him to succeed, despite yourself.

I reviewed this weekend’s MobLand for Decider.

“I said if you help the Harrigans, the Harrigans will help you. You have not helped the Harrigans. Not at all. Okay? So now I, Kevin here, he’s gonna lose his family, I’m gonna lose my family, both of us are gonna die, and others, yeah? Thanks to you, okay, and Eddie. So I don’t think it’s very fair that you don’t share in some of that joy, you understand.”

Harry Da Souza has a strange way of speaking. Understatement is one of his primary rhetorical devices: “You have not helped the Harrigans” to a man who helped conceal a war-starting murder. “I don’t think it’s very fair” that you don’t die along with the rest of us. I keep circling back to that big in the first episode where he tells an eyewitness that unless he cooperates, either Harry “or one of my associates, depending upon my availability” will kill him for it. He’s a man with the power of life and death, but he talks like a slightly peeved Nando’s manager. 

He peppers his speech with little stops and starts, little marks of inquisition designed to give the listener no other choice but to agree with him. Look at that paragraph above, the way it’s dotted with “Okay? Yeah? Okay. You understand.” It sounds like he’s merely commiserating with his interlocutor, relating to him, saying “obviously you and I agree that this is simple common sense,” even as he’s threatening to kill the man and his wife and children.

I reviewed this week’s episode of MobLand for Decider.

One thing I’ll say for this episode is that it’s some of the calmest filmmaking I’ve ever seen from director Guy Ritchie, once again working off a script from series creator Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth. There aren’t really any splashy images or flashy cuts, more just lingering shots of people aged 40-80 looking older and wiser than the various lads and louts who are giving them headaches. 

And sexier, too. From Tom Hardy and Lara Pulver as the extinguished flames Harry and Bella to Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan as IGILFs (Irish Grandparents I’d Like to Fuck) Maeve and Conrad, there’s a lot of simmering going on here for actors of various demographics that can be sadly underrepresented in the simmer department. You love to see it. 

I would, however, also love to see this show make a stronger argument for its existence. MobLand is very entertaining while it’s on, with a bunch of fine, fun actors making the crisp tough-guy dialogue sing. It’s just that the recipe is so familiar that the taste doesn’t linger when the meal is done. I’m looking for something that’ll make me say “Ooh, new MobLand is out!” instead of merely “Oh hey, new MobLand is out.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of MobLand for Decider.

Running through the plot just now, the whole thing feels rather breezy and entertaining. When your top-billed cast are Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, and Joanne Froggat, it’s hard not to be entertaining. I’ve seen shows squander strong casts — Zero Day, cough cough — but MobLand is not one of them. I’m not a hundred percent sold on what Mirren’s doing just yet, though she certainly looks incredible doing it, but Brosnan tears into his bombastic crime boss character with grinning ferocity. The moment where he mimics the pigs to whom he fed the gangster who both mentored and molested him is unexpected and delightful. 

Hardy, for his part, fully understands that the innate seriousness projected by his hangdog handsomeness is also innately funny in some way — just as it was when he played Bane, or Venom, or Mad Max. He brings that same blockbuster-role energy to this crime tale, and it matches well with the crisp direction of action veteran Guy Ritchie, who mined much the same vein in his surprisingly strong black crime comedy The Gentlemen on Netflix last year. Both shows even end their premieres with the same inciting incident: somebody shooting someone to death in front of their family in a poshly appointed room in a country house. 

But that comparison doesn’t flatter MobLand. The Gentlemen brought a madcap brio to its story of aristocrats, the original gangsters in most respects, turned actual gangsters, and is maybe the best thing Ritchie ever did. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s fine prequel series to the Jonathan Glazer British gangster classic Sexy Beast, also from last year, had heart-on-sleeve romance and genuine terror that MobLand so far lacks. It’s pretty good, sure, a classic “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” situation. It’s still got time to prove itself to be something more.

I reviewed the series premiere of MobLand for Decider.