Lots of people wish it were still the 1990s. You’d expect that Tony Blair does, and Tim Lovejoy probably does, and the guy fromBabylon Zoo definitely does, and anyone who bought an Oasis ticket this year only did that because they live in a state of perpetual revulsion that the millennium ever happened. But I guarantee you that nothing on Earth wishes it were the 1990s more than the new Paramount+ seriesMobLand.
Just describing MobLand (out Sunday 30 March) feels like a game of 1990s nostalgia bingo. It’s directed by Guy Ritchie, the 90s director. It stars Pierce Brosnan, the 90s Bond. It’s a London-set crime drama full of characters who talk in cartoonish cockney accents like they’re doing Parklife karaoke. The criminals are a family called the Stevensons, rather than a bunch of kids on mopeds who nick your phone and sell it to China. One of the central locations, returned to in multiple episodes, is a bar where (and I’m genuinely not making this up) the only music played exclusively comes from the Prodigy’s 1997 album The Fat of the Land. Even the way the word MobLand is formatted – condensed into one word with a capital L in the middle – makes it looks as if it should be thename of a 90s boyband.
This would be fine, had MobLand been set in the 1990s. But that isn’t the case. It’s set in present-day London, though nobody involved seems to have actually been to London for about 30 years. What’s more annoying is that, once you peel all this away – once you get rid of the accents and posturing and gormless “Yer a facking numpty” dialogue – you’re left with the seed of a pretty good show.
MobLand is the story of Tom Hardy, a gangland fixer who is charged with keeping the peace between two warring families when a young man goes missing. One of the families is made up of Brosnan and Paddy Considine, and the other is led by a much less famous actor, so you know where your sympathies are meant to lie. The police are circling Hardy, and his ever-evolving list of emergencies to solve stretches out infinitely in front of him. He looks exhausted, and so would you if you found yourself surrounded by so many tortured cockney accents.
In truth, it’s the sort of role Hardy could play in his sleep, and at points it seems as if he actually is. Only intermittently does he do the same magic trick he did in the Venom films, elevating some generic material by making it unexpectedly soulful and funny. The scenes with his wife (Joanne Froggatt) where he tries tocommunicate with her using terms picked up during couples therapy are droll and nuanced and hint at a version of this that’s as interested in texture as it is in Vinnie Jones cosplay. But for the most part he’s only called to walk from location to location, glumly cleaning up other people’s messes, like Mike from BreakingBad after abad blow tothe head.
Which isn’t a knock, because he is also by far the best thing about MobLand. The family he works for, the Harrigans, are led by Brosnan and Helen Mirren doing a pair of criminally Lucky Charms-ish Irish accents that are only made more bewildering when you remember that Brosnan is, you know, literally Irish. And then there’s Paddy Considine. I was only given access to the first two episodes, so you’d have to imagine that things will get meatier for him later in the series, otherwise you could easily lose entire days wondering why an actorof his immense talent has taken on a role so pointlesslyanonymous.
That’s the main takeaway of MobLand in general, in fact. There are so many big names here, all doing mediocre work in service of material that (at least so far) is leagues below them. Maybe they were offered vast amounts of money. Maybe they’re phoning it in because nobody actually has Paramount+. Either way, right now they’re all coming off as pawns in Guy Ritchie’s weird nostalgia fantasy, and that won’t do at all.
