MobLand

Our Review

Tom Hardy. Pierce Brosnan. Helen Mirren. Guy Ritchie producing. That cast sheet alone makes MobLand worth the subscription month, and the show underneath the casting is a genuinely solid British gangster saga about two crime families on a collision course over a missing boy and a very bad decision. Hardy plays the fixer, the man who keeps the Harrigan empire’s machinery running; Brosnan the patriarch whose charm is armor over rot; Mirren the matriarch who may be the most dangerous person in the room, which in this room is saying something. Season one established the terrain. London meets Succession with body bags, and season two, arriving September 18, escalates the war the finale promised. Ritchie’s stylistic tics are restrained here (he produces; direction rotates), letting the cast carry long stretches of menace and dark humor. The writing is pulpy but sharp, the violence sudden and consequential, and Mirren is doing the best gangster work of her career. It’s not revolutionary, it’s a well oiled genre machine with A-list fuel. Sometimes that’s exactly the show you want.