MobLand review: Tom Hardy grunts his way through Guy Ritchie’s soapy homage to The Godfather

Also read – Havoc movie review: Tom Hardy unleashes a tornado of violence in Netflix’s blood-drenched action-thriller

Tom Hardy in a still from MobLand.

But his duties mainly involve cleaning up messes, negotiating deals, and tracking down those who wish to remain hidden. Harry has connections all over the (under)world; he’s the sort of guy you deploy when a body needs to be buried or an asset rescued. When Conrad’s maniacal grandson, Eddie, murders his sworn enemy Richie Stevenson’s grandson, the long-held tensions between the two clans escalate to the brink of war. It’s like when Don Corleone’s enemies had Sunny murdered. But Conrad isn’t the sort of man who’d call for a meeting of the five families to resolve differences; the term ‘proportional response’ perhaps doesn’t exist in his book.

Harry, however, does the responsible thing by trying to broker peace between the two families, mainly to save them from themselves. He knows that neither Conrad nor Ritchie is the sort of person who can be talked down from a ledge. To make matters worse, he knows that Conrad’s strings are secretly being pulled by his wife, Maeve, played by Helen Mirren in a performance so over-the-top that she might just be auditioning for a Sanjay Gupta movie. This makes for an uneven viewing experience; while some performances are cartoonishly camp, Hardy is objectively catatonic. It’s as if he exists in a different world entirely.

Written by Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth, MobLand opens with a two-episode premiere directed by Guy Ritchie. Neither episode has Ritchie’s trademark kinetic camerawork, or even his lyrical lingo. He’s a gun for hire here, creatively hands-off to the point that he probably didn’t weigh in on the wardrobe. But MobLand works on a very basic level; the characters and storylines are familiar enough for major pacing issues to be overlooked. It isn’t exactly ambient TV, but it’s certainly not the kind of show that requires undivided attention.

The writing is often clumsy; a key moment hinges entirely on a deus ex machina so illogical that you could be forgiven for assuming that the episode was written by Hussain Dalal. Harry has a solution for virtually every problem, including those that haven’t yet presented themselves. It makes you wonder why someone with his skillset isn’t running his own operation. Even if he can’t be a crime kingpin himself — Conrad would kill him for the betrayal — he could, at least, avoid playing the role of a glorified gofer. Midway through the season, Harry is sent all the way to Belgium to rescue Conrad’s two grown kids; they’re both like Fredo, desperate to impress dad but utterly incapable of it.

Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren in a still from MobLand.

Read more – Fountain of Youth movie review: We never got a third National Treasure movie, and thanks to Guy Ritchie, we still haven’t

Much of the action, however, unfolds in London. After an unexpected mid-season plot development, everybody is summoned to hunker down in the Harrigans’ summer estate in the Cotswolds. Cooped up under one roof, the family drama takes centerstage. Maeve even cooks up a storm for her beloved Eddie, like Clemenza did in The Godfather. Harry’s wife Jan, on the other hand, contemplates leaving him. In one scene, she looks forlornly at her husband flying away on a dangerous mission, and sighs to herself about not finding any of this sexy anymore.

Unfortunately, this is the general impression that you’re likely to have of the show itself. It’s so derivative of past gangster classics that it comes across as positively lazy. It may well be. There isn’t a shred of doubt, for instance, that it was birthed as a Yellowstone clone — MobLand isn’t fully algorithmic like most of the stuff you’d find on Netflix, but barring the performances, there’s little to recommend about it.

MobLand
Creator – Ronan Bennett
Cast – Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, Joanne Froggatt, Lara Pulver, Mandeep Dhillon, Janet McTeer
Rating – 2.5/5