MobLand

The casting is spot on, with Mirren and Brosnan as a nasty mob boss couple, the Harrigans, who ignite the screen like dynamite ready to blow away your senses with their evil doings. If that doesn't put the fear in you, then there is the fixer, Harry Da Souza (played by the cool cold steel talents of Tom Hardy), who is also a loving husband and father, and in between carries out dirty work for the mob family. A small situation gets out of hand, and it is going to get very ugly. So with Guy Ritchie directing the first episode and setting the tone, you know it is going to be a tense bloodbath with anything goes...

The series Mobland starts off strong and is carried by Tom Hardy. The other actors range from decent to completely over-the-top - especially Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, who are genuinely hard to watch.

The show lacks an overarching storyline, instead stringing together one narrative fragment after another, often feeling more like a soap opera than an actual mafia series. Many scenes are marked by illogical decisions. All in all, it's nowhere near masterpieces like The Sopranos.

It's a show you can easily binge in one or two days, have a good time with, and completely forget about four weeks later. Without Tom Hardy, it would be a 5 out of 10.

Show did an excellent job of establishing characters and what their individual idiosyncrasies are. A mob story but character driven. It reminded me of the Sopranos that way. The characters are just as interesting as the plot lines. What happened in the last few episodes was what happens to a lot of shows that start strong, the writers just start throwing too much on top of the characters. They become inconsistent with the exception of Harry. The writers amp up the brutality to wear the violence becomes disproportionately too much. It is not lost on me that a mob story will have violence. What sometimes happens and I think what happened with this show, is that the characters become more erratic and more violent but at the same time they're asked to plot and think and connive their way towards their own ends. In a 10 episode season, some characters are not even recognizable from where they were built to where they wind up. That's not necessarily character evolution. It felt like a lot of the characters were lobotomized. Plot devices are inserted in a heavy-handed way to make this one a good guy and this one a bad guy. I don't feel like we were treated very intelligently as the season moved along. There was a lot of potential here, and as some reviewers have written, the show really lost its way.

MobLand is a sort of Roman history-like / Shakespearean over the top crime show that brings Miller's Crossing together with a Guy Ritchie-type universe.

Our "hero" is Tom Hardy, fixer guy for The Harringon Family, led by the diabolical and insane Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. They want to expand into the fentanyl business, but their son may have been involved in a homicide with a rival crime lord's son...and now it's "nuclear war." Tom Hardy has to protect both his crime family and his real family - and win the war.

This show is a lot of fun. The acting is great and the production value is superb. The theme some / credits intro for this show might be the best of any show since Game of Thrones, and it really jazzes you up and gets you excited for the story.

The writing is mostly really good, but it ranges from over the top to kind of underwhelming. For example, there is a scene with a chainsaw that is bloodshed and madness, but what should have been a game-changer turned into something where then there is never really much of an emotional resonance from anyone. Characters kind of just "go on." Also, it introduces this crime lord to be the main antagonist, and I think by the end it's unclear what made him such a threat in the first place.

Lastly, this world is full of backstabbing and chaos, it's so over-the-top that nobody who existed in this world could be real, and that is both part of the fun and also the challenge of MobLand. It's in no way shape or form a real look at mob life - it's more like a Roman-era bloody tale of madness and revenge.

But, whatever.

The show is a total binge-worthy blast and I'd absolutely watch a second season.

The performances of Tom Hardy and Geoff Bell are exemplary. The characters portrayed by both Brosnan and Mirren seem to envisage a stereotypical Irish brutish gangster family in a somewhat comical yet condescending way.

The recent BBC production of This city is ours set in Liverpool mirrors plot wise the themes of Macbeth once again.

Both though are very watchable even though they don't convey the true nature's of OCGs in Britain today.

The horrors and consequences of gangland action upon not just local but national society is not adequately explored.

Maybe we could be in danger of romanticising Hardys character to the detriment of overlooking his crimes.