‘MobLand – Season 2’ Paramount+ Review: An English Crime Family Battles New Enemies and Old Conflicts
The Harrigans face new enemies and deeper divisions as their violent family empire becomes increasingly difficult for Harry to keep together. On Paramount+ from September 18.
A gangster saga more inclined toward violence than ideas, and characters more comfortable with guns than conversation, MobLand is a strange case of a series that works well and yet, ultimately, feels like a waste. The first part is fairly obvious. With a breakneck pace and a strong stylistic imprint established by Guy Ritchie —who directed the opening episodes of both seasons— the series about an English crime family is entertaining, explosive, violent and, at times, downright furious. At the same time, considering the talent assembled in front of the camera —Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, Toby Jones, Johnny Flynn and others— it’s hard not to feel that this is simply not enough: more fireworks than substance, more criminal posturing and paraphernalia than anything genuinely interesting.
That’s where, it seems, MobLand falls short. It is a good series, there’s no denying that, and the cast has a lot to do with making it one. But it always seems more interested in delivering precise jolts —shootouts, explosions, kidnappings, betrayals, assorted murders, sex— than in actually exploring a family saga in any depth. So what might have been an English Godfather —or Anglo-Irish, to be fair to the Harrigans’ origins— has to settle for a prêt-à-porter version of that saga, more flashy than effective, more grandiose than truly grand.
The second season picks up from the events at the end of the first, and right away a sharp division emerges within what sometimes feels like the show’s version of Succession with guns. Dad Conrad (Brosnan) and Mom Maeve (Mirren) are at odds with their son Kevin (Considine), and the first major development puts that conflict front and center, as a Turkish crime syndicate negotiates a deal with both sides simultaneously, doing nothing but intensifying the family feud. But what Harry (Hardy), the Harrigans’ gun-toting consigliere, realizes is that this isn’t a mistake. It’s a deliberate attempt to drive them further apart and, with the family on the floor, emerge victorious.
There are several people coming after the Harrigans. There’s the powerful Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer), who operates on an entirely different level of the power hierarchy —she is described as the “boss of bosses”— and the slippery Colin Tattersall (Jones), a former cop who operates according to his own rules. And now the two of them have brought in a new player: a man named Charlie (Flynn), another ruthless criminal who steps into the Harrigans’ internal conflict, trying to dismantle the family even further in a rather direct and explosive fashion. But they aren’t the only ones circling. The family is surrounded by vultures who smell blood and want their share.
The Harrigans have other problems, too. Kevin’s volatile son Eddie (Anson Boon) continues to cause trouble, and now Harry’s daughter has joined his crew, while Harry’s marriage to Jan (Joanne Froggatt) continues to disintegrate by the day. Conrad’s “bastard” daughter, Seraphine (Mandeep Dhillon), remains involved in the clean side of the family business, but she can’t help getting her hands dirty elsewhere. Grandma Maeve keeps getting everyone else into trouble with her impulsive decisions and demands, while patriarch Conrad refuses to accept what everyone else can see quite clearly: the man is losing his grip.
In the middle of all this, the increasingly tortured Harry continues trying to keep all the pieces in balance, but it’s clear that he can’t. He seems to be the only remotely grounded man in a group of lunatics who keep getting themselves into one problem after another for no particularly good reason, but even he isn’t enough. The Harrigans are unmanageable, and Harry has to find a way to survive their madness and whims. The series itself operates within that same balance, surrounded by a gallery of eccentric characters who seem determined to throw literal fuel on the fire every five minutes, while Harry/Hardy carries on his shoulders something like the seriousness and depth one wishes the series itself had more of.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with MobLand being explosive, or even adolescent in its seemingly endless enthusiasm for chaos. But at times the series seems content simply to throw its characters into one extreme conflict after another, as if everything always had to be played at maximum volume. That intensity does allow it to deliver some memorable scenes —Mirren and Brosnan, in particular, seem to be having an absolute blast with their characters— but one would also appreciate the occasional moment of calm, reflection and atmosphere. A good gangster story should offer something more than situations built around tension, violence and danger. And MobLand simply doesn’t have enough of that extra ingredient to join the classics.
