MobLand

Wholly unoriginal yet embarrassingly addictive, MobLand can best be described as a soap opera for boys. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the gangster drama (briefly) unseated Taylor Sheridan’s blockbusters off the viewership charts — Sheridan has built a literal empire on the back of expensive sagas aimed at men, like Yellowstone. MobLand combines his signature brand of family drama with gruff machismo of a Bollywood potboiler; it’s an experience so Ajay Devgn-coded that Tom Hardy’s protagonist could have just as easily been introduced with a packet of Vimal in his hands, and we’d have been none the wiser. He may as well be chewing ‘elaichi’ in his scenes, going by his line delivery. Hardy can be magnificently theatrical when he wants — “let’s not stand on ceremony here!” — but he’s made a name for himself as one of the great mumblers of his generation. That’s exactly what he does as Harry Da Souza in MobLand. Harry is a fixer of sorts, torn between his two families — the real one, with wife Jan and teenage daughter Gina; and the one that he has been adopted into, the Harrigans. Like Tom Hagen from The Godfather, Harry is the brain and brawn behind the Harrigans’ criminal empire, led by the psychotic patriarch Conrad, played by Pierce Brosnan.

The new crime drama, MobLand, directed by Guy Ritchie, holds all the hallmarks of the filmmaker. And yet there is something distinctive missing from the gritty gangster saga as Tom Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, a fixer left to clean up the many messes of the Harrigan family. So far, the nine-episode London-set series is keeping a cliffhanger for each chapter in trying to raise the tension. Ronan Bennett’s series has had a slow-moving start, but it needs to amp things up to match the intensity of Ritchie’s other projects. Hardy’s Harry has been loyally serving Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) for a long time now. The fixer saves the old crime lord and every member of his family whenever they get in a bind. But we join the story at a bit of a power struggle between the Harrigans and their rivals, the Stevensons, before erupting into an all out war. As Harry tries to smoothen things over, his family life suffers as well. Who will be left standing at the end when the lines are all drawn out against family loyalties?