‘MobLand’ Review – Guy Ritchie Gets Back To His Gangster Roots

Guy Ritchie is a filmmaker who made a name for himself on the streets – more specifically, in the gallows between big-hit blockbusters. Low budgets, stacked casts, and an extreme reliance on visual style and innovative, non-linear storytelling. 

Oh, and gangsters. So many gangsters. MobLand finds so much success in simply getting back to this version of the director, let alone all else that it does well. This is a crime series from one of the most seasoned crime storytellers in the business; how could it not have been good?

The show, a Paramount + original (the most underrated streaming service) written and created by Ronan Bennett, documents the battle between two London-based crime families, with Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren heading the cast. That’s a trio that looks as good on screen as it sounds on paper. Guy Ritchie’s unreal dialogue serves the actors in ways in which you wouldn’t expect, too. From seriously well-written contemplations to vulgar, signature one-offs that only Ritchie could conjure up, the three of them combine with Ritchie to produce something that feels fit with the filmmaker’s past in the best possible way.

And the story, whilst starting slow, finds proper footing as the series progresses, thriving time and time again on strong character introductions and a clever interweaving of the series’ multiple happenings, settings and stories. The series opens cold, with Tom Hardy trying to manage a dispute between two rival gangs. After coming to the realization, via a confirmation from Pierce Brosnan between bites of food, he decides to settle things on his own terms. Without spoilers, the first episode is full of interactions like these.

Not only do they draw immediate interest and excitement from the audience, but they also give the show a longer lead, if you will, when it decides to slow things down and spend a little extra time on the characters and environments that supplant the conflicts. When you know something insane is coming, as the show proved in its very first scene, it’s much easier to hang around for extended stretches of exposition and similar story-building. To that point, this may be one of Ritchie’s most compelling casts in a long while.

The director never fails to put together a rag-tag crew and make them entertaining, but to make them engaging? That’s an entirely different metric, and one that Ritchie isn’t necessarily known for. But on multiple levels on MobLand, he succeeds in doing so. Hardy’s Harry Da Souza (complemented wonderfully by Joanne Froggatt’s Jan Da Souza), in addition to adding yet another semi-questionable accent to the actor’s repertoire, allows him to pull back the reins a little in comparison to recent roles.

His cards here are much closer to his character’s chest when pitted against something like, say, Capone, in which Hardy plays a similar person in a similar setting, only to a far more dramatic and unraveled extent. Without saying anything overt about that performance, in MobLand, he just looks far more comfortable. As this first season comes to a head, Hardy is really the vehicle by which it crosses the finish line. He, in tandem with Ritchie’s signature stylistic choices, is the main catalyst for the series’ success.

This is just a hard one to turn down. While it isn’t setting any sort of new standard on the crime television scene, MobLand is a fitting way to spend a few afternoons, working through a well-paced season of digestible drama and above-average filmmaking. The performances are expectedly brilliant, the humor sharp, and, above all else, Pierce Brosnan goes fishing in a big, goofy pair of boots. What more could you ask for?

MobLand is currently available to stream on Paramount+. New episodes will be available to stream every Sunday.