It’s hard to imagine now that Guy Ritchie was once a thrilling new voice in British cinema. The boorish and cartoony Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels marked its writer-director as a compelling answer to Tarantino before Snatch upped the ante considerably, establishing his penchant for a comically convoluted plot and deadpan hardmen undercutting the tension with dry one-liners. The danger of cultivating such a distinctive style though, is that you can easily lapse into self-parody.
To his credit, Ritchie attempted to break his own formula but Swept Away, his unwise 2002 rom-com remake with then-wife Madonna, proved such a critical and commercial disaster that it forced him to retreat. He’s since swung between super-sized retreads (Revolver, RocknRolla), semi-successful franchise studio fare (Sherlock Holmes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E) and, more recently, a couple of box office bombs in Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and the unfortunately named The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
So what’s a boy to do? If 2019’s The Gentleman and its TV spin-off are anything to go by, the answer is to embrace self-parody like a mobster warmly dispensing a kiss of death. Which brings us to MobLand, a gangster thriller with broad brush strokes of comedy and a plot as generic as its title. For all the narrative twists and turns, perhaps the biggest mystery is quite how Ritchie managed to convince Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren to sign up to something so daft.
London crime family The Stevensons, led by oily patriarch Richie (Geoff Bell), have lucrative control of the city’s fentanyl trade. The Harrigans, headed up by Brosnan’s buffoonish Conrad, would like to loosen that grip. As the tension between the two clans escalates, it emerges that Conrad’s wildcard grandson Eddie (Anson Boon) has been knocking about with Richie’s own grandson Tommy (Felix Edwards) – a gangland scandal in the making. Caught in the middle of all this is the Harrigans’ ‘fixer’ Harry (Hardy), a solid geezer with a sunny demeanour that remains undimmed even when he’s shoving bodies into already-occupied coffins.
MobLand started life as a spin-off from the long-running crime drama Ray Donovan, before taking on a life of its own. It was co-created with former Top Boy showrunner Ronan Bennett but is billed as Ritchie’s project since he executive-produced the series and directed the first two episodes. Flashes of violence, overlapping plot lines and gangsters in sharp suits are all present and correct; you’d certainly guess it was his work. There’s also been an attempt to create some compelling female characters this time around, even if it’s hard to tell exactly what accent Helen Mirren is attempting (we think it’s Irish).
Tom Hardy, both endearing and menacing, is easily the best thing in the show but Boon also deserves props for bringing the same bug-eyed intensity he cultivated in Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols biopic Pistol to MobLand. However, for all the laugh-out-loud moments and intriguing plot lines, it’s hard to believe Guy Ritchie is still rolling out the same old schtick. It’s as well made a version of this show as you could expect but it’s nothing to get excited about. Lock, Stock feels like a very long time ago indeed.
‘MobLand’ is available to watch now on Paramount+