I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything. By the end of this review you won’t want to watch even a moment of this dog’s breakfast of an atrocity of charmless, witless, misbegotten, amoral tripe anyway.
So we’re in a basement with Tom Hardy, playing his usual amiably ruthless hard-man character. This time he’s called Harry Da Souza and he’s the chief fixer for a London-based Irish crime family called the Harrigans. On this occasion, Da Souza is mediating between two lower-tier rival gangs, whom he has orders to make apologise to one another. After much tense negotiation, the gang leaders agree to shake hands but refuse to apologise. Da Souza goes upstairs to where his boss Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) is enjoying an elegant solo dinner and enquires whether this will be sufficient. It isn’t. So Da Souza returns to the basement, gives his associates the nod, and all the recalcitrant gang members are machine-gunned to death.
I suppose the idea of this establishing scene is to demonstrate the capriciousness, the brutal pragmatism and kingpin-ish power of Harrigan, the loyalty and efficiency of Da Souza, and – to the viewer – ‘If you like mindless violence, mate, this is just for starters: plenty more where this came from.’ But to me, it just signalled desperation, implausibility and ugliness.
What crime boss of Harrigan’s supposed calibre would allow people to be killed so messily on his property? Think of the possible ricochets in an enclosed space; think of the blood traces and embedded bullets, a gift to any potential future forensics examination.
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