Tom Hardy & Pierce Brosnan in Paramount+ Crime Drama

You’d have to go all the way back to 2000’s Snatch for the last Guy Ritchie project that I awaited with unabashed anticipation.

At the time, Ritchie was coming off of the sleeper success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and he seemed like one of the freshest young voices in British cinema. Of course, Ritchie followed Snatch with Swept Away, setting off a prolific and unpredictable career of hits and misses (more the latter than the former).

I was astounded, though, by how much I enjoyed Ritchie’s 2024 Netflix series, The Gentleman. Despite my tepid feelings for the source material — Hugh Grant kept that film watchable — and generally tepid feelings for leading man Theo James, I thought The Gentleman was a blast, a well-calibrated mixture of wild supporting performances and high-octane action, held together by Kaya Scodelario’s extremely confident central turn.

The Gentlemen was so much fun that it made me wonder if perhaps television was Ritchie’s ideal storytelling venue, whetting my appetite for his star-studded Paramount+ crime thriller, MobLand.

Premiering this weekend, MobLand is a more somber, less propulsive affair than The Gentlemen. The cast is, indeed, tremendous and the second of only two episodes sent to critics exhibited notes of quirky humor than felt like an improvement. Rather than setting itself up for comparisons to The Gentlemen, MobLand comes across as a somewhat less distinctive version of recent British gangland dramas like Netflix’s Peaky Blinders and Sky Atlantic/AMC+’s Gangs of London.

Ritchie has chased genre classics by the likes of Mike Hodges (Get Carter), John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday) and Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa) before, and it’s a thing he does decently if derivatively. But so far it’s too early to tell what MobLand offers in terms of its own perspective.

MobLand was created by Ronan Bennett (The Day of the Jackal), who wrote at least the first two episodes with playwright Jez Butterworth, while Ritchie directed both season-opening chapters.

The series is about the escalating war between two London-based crime families.

Pierce Brosnan plays Conrad, patriarch of the Harrigans, who have roots and accents from Ireland. As genre tradition dictates, Conrad looks like he’s in charge, but wife Maeve (Helen Mirren) may be the brains and guts of the operation, which seems to revolve around drugs. Conrad and Maeve’s kids Kevin (Paddy Considine) and Brendan (Daniel Betts), plus Conrad’s daughter Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon), are involved in some way, as is Conrad’s longtime best friend Archie (Alex Jennings).

Trouble begins to arise when Kevin’s dangerously messy son (Anson Boon’s Eddie) has a wild night that includes a nightclub stabbing and the disappearance of the son of Conrad’s gangland rival, Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell). Richie worries about his son and he worries that Conrad is trying to take over his turf, and he’s right to worry about at least one of those things.

As circumstances escalate, Conrad turns to his longtime fixer and Kevin’s longtime friend, Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy). Harry is a master of back alley diplomacy, with secondary skills in violent intimidation and mumbled threats. He’s also having issues with wife Jan (Joanne Froggatt), but he seems earnestly invested in saving his marriage and supporting his teenage daughter, so you know he’s a good guy at heart — or at least a decently mumbly guy, which is the closest Hardy can muster.

MobLand was initially developed as a spinoff from Showtime’s Ray Donovan, and while any and all direct connections have been erased, the now wholly standalone series still feels a lot like Ray Donovan. A Vocational Irony Narrative about an ultra-capable fixer who can fix everybody else’s issues but not his own, MobLand has similar swagger and a similarly deceptive testosterone saturation; it’s a series about men doing manly things in the most violent way possible, when the show’s biggest badasses are, unsurprisingly, its female characters, including Maeve, Jan, Kevin’s wife Bella (Lara Pulver), Harry’s sidekick Zosia (Jasmine Jobson) and more.

What really holds MobLand back in the early going is its vagueness, a frequent defense mechanism by which the writers want a group of mobsters to be our antiheroes, but prefer to soft pedal their day-to-day activities so we don’t lose empathy entirely. They can do bad things to each other, but when you have Conrad talking about the family connection to heroin and his desire to get into the fentanyl business, it’s hard to retain audience investment. So in the early going, Conrad is making oblique references to the family business, but it’s easier to just evade how they make a living entirely.

Whether this is proof that too many writers (or, more likely, development executives) misunderstood why Breaking Bad worked is an open question. Either way, it makes MobLand feel like a Mad Libs version of a crime drama. “Conrad Harrigan engaged in [ILLEGAL TRADE] and has decided he wants to expand the operation to include [EVEN MORE ILLEGAL, MORE LUCRATIVE TRADE] — but is he willing to [ILLEGAL VIOLENT ACTIVITY] to expand his empire?”

And specificity is what makes the “fixer” genre so much fun, ideally. Audiences like watching capable problem solvers, and because fixers tend to be intermediaries, they aren’t directly involved in the bad stuff. We wouldn’t want to watch Harry getting directly involved in dealing fentanyl, but ideally he should have clever and innovative ways of sorting out Conrad’s difficulties getting into the fentanyl business. Especially in the first episode, though, Harry’s methodology is a little bland, matching the blandness of Conrad’s enterprise.

The characters, or at least the actors playing them are much better.

Brosnan is chilly and menacing, though toward the end of the pilot he has a strange exchange that ends in a pig impression so wonderfully unhinged it suggests myriad interpretations for what makes this powerful man tick. Or maybe it’s just Maeve making him tick, with Mirren giving another of her patented wily matriarch performances, dusting off her exaggerated Irish accent from Paramount+’s 1923. And yes, Paramount+ could do worse than making Helen Mirren its corporate poster girl — like Chad Michael Murray in the early days of The WB.

One of the things Hardy does best — one of the things that made his performance in the Venom films so much better than the Venom films themselves — is play a man who isn’t wholly comfortable in his own skin and always seems on the verge of ripping off his own flesh to reveal what’s underneath. Here, he’s keeping the audience guessing whether the thing that will be revealed under his fixer flesh-suit is an undomesticated wolf or a well-intentioned family man, but Harry is capable of passing in both high and low society, without necessarily belonging in either.

So far, two episodes haven’t been enough to get a sense of most of the supporting performances. I like that Boon is playing his archetypically unstable character as an extension of his Johnny Rotten from FX’s generally forgotten Pistol. Bell, a Ritchie regular, offers an uncouth but equally menacing counterpoint to Brosnan, a mobster who isn’t pretending that he’s crawled out of the muck. Bell has a couple of strong moments in the second episode, as do Jobson, Pulver and Froggatt.

The second episode isn’t some sort of huge improvement or change of course from the pilot, but among other things it offers a well-executed car chase in the Cotswalds, longer stretches of dialogue pointing to Butterworth’s theatrical origins, and the first opportunity to see Hardy’s Harry break through his fragile veneer of civility in satisfying ways. This show obviously has no interest in being as zany as The Gentlemen, but more than the first episode, the second is a chance to see how MobLand could take itself seriously and still be entertaining. I’ll be curious to see how the series plays in subsequent episodes, especially episodes without Ritchie behind the camera. There’s no lack of potential here, just a lack of episodes upon which to fairly base this review.