MobLand: TV Review - Top Notch Cast Saves Middling Mob Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This isn’t a great show…and it might not even be a good show…but it is somehow, someway, a somewhat mindlessly entertaining show.

MobLand, which stars Tom Hardy as a mob-fixer in modern-day London, just finished its first season on Paramount +…and I have some thoughts.

As readers may remember, I have been in a bit of a funk when it comes to film and television as of late…television in particular. I have been overcome with a great sense of indifference to the current era of “prestige tv”, and have struggled to even watch a show for more than two episodes.

For example, the recent spate of new seasons of prestige tv dramas – Severance, The Last of Us and The White Lotus, I did not watch or quit watching after two episodes because I just didn’t give a shit.

Readers may also remember that I almost skipped the Disney + series Andor altogether, but ended up watching it out of some weird sense of duty and ended up really loving it.

Which brings us to MobLand.

I am not a regular Paramount + viewer. In fact, I’m usually not subscribed to the streaming service but because my wife wanted to watch one of the shows she enjoys (Yellowjackets) we got it for like a three-month deal or something. It was during this stretch that I saw ads for MobLand…and I saw it starred Tom Hardy, an actor I really admire, and when I was bored one day, I figured, why not give MobLand a try?

MobLand, which premiered its first episode March 30th and ended its ten-episode season June 1st, has quite the pedigree…it is produced by British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, it is co-written and created by esteemed playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth, and its cast features the aforementioned Tom Hardy as well as Paddy Considine, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren….not too shabby.

The series follows the travails of Harry De Souza (Hardy), a fixer for the Harrigan crime family. The Harrigans – led by aging patriarch Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and Lady MacBeth like matriarch Maeve (Helen Mirren), are quite the collection of misfits and miscreants. Kevin Harrigan (Paddy Considine), son to Conrad and Maeve, is Harry De Souza’s childhood friend and his adult accomplice in crime.

Of course, Harry and Kevin have wives and teenage kids and they create all sorts of drama too, and Conrad and Maeve like to stir the pot with their various nefarious machinations as well. There are also the cops who are breathing down the Harrigan’s neck as is another crime family looking for blood and to take their crown.

I’ll avoid plot specifics from here on in…but rest assure there is A LOT of plot, and a whole lotta shit going down in the seedy London crime world.

So, is MobLand as great show? No. Is it a good show? I’ll be honest…I don’t think so. Is it a watchable show? Yes…most definitely.

The reason it’s watchable is because it has a terrific cast that do steady work despite the at-times trying script. The plot is…well…very tv show-ish…meaning it is preposterous and outlandish to the point of being absurd.

MobLand isn’t the Sopranos, or the Godfather or Goodfellas…and yet…I kept watching it, which is saying a great deal. As flawed as it is, its greatest trait is that it is somehow mindless enough to be oddly compelling.  

Tom Hardy does stellar work as the brooding Harry, who navigates the Harrigan spiderweb of treachery with a steely-eyed aplomb. Hardy never lets you down and that is very true in MobLand, as this show just doesn’t work without him.

Pierce Brosnan is showier than we’ve ever seen him as Conrad – the bombastic and brutal crime boss, and it is amusing to watch him huff and puff and blow doors down in every scene he inhabits.

Paddy Considine, a truly remarkable actor, gives maybe the best performance in the show as a conflicted and psychologically tormented son to greatness. Considine imbues his Kevin with a bruised and battered humanity that is desperately trying to survive in a cruel and heartless world, and it is quite riveting to behold.

Unfortunately, I found Helen Mirren’s performance as Maeve to be, frankly, distractingly bad, but at least she isn’t in it enough to really muck things up. There’s just something off about Mirren’s portrayal of Maeve…a sort of disconnect, which is not apparent in any of the other performances.

One performance of note is Anson Boon as Eddie Harrigan, Kevin’s rebellious son (and Conrad and Maeve’s favorite grandchild). Boon is so good at playing Eddie as a despicable douchebag asshole, that he might just ruin his entire career. And the costume designer who put him in the most off-putting douchebag ensembles, deserves an Emmy – well done. Boon is like that kid who played Joffrey in Game of Thrones and was so good at being an obnoxious piece of shit he essentially quit acting afterwards. Boon as Eddie has the most punchable face in recent memory and the attitude to match…and it is shocking how much I hated this little prick. Kudos to him.

As for the structure of the series, it is kind of all over the place. The show starts small and gets much too big for its britches and it becomes more preposterous with every passing moment and by the end of season one is borderline psychotic. But like I said, it is an oddly fun piece of mindless tv…and can be enjoyed in that way.

If you’re bored, or bed-ridden, or have nothing else to do but stare out a window, you could do much worse than watch MobLand to pass the time. It is one of those shows that asks nothing from you and lets you just watch with no pressure and no expectations.

MobLand certainly didn’t end my indifference towards television, but it did do enough to keep me watching it…and that should be considered a victory…for who I have no idea.

©2025

Ghosted: A Review – Apple TV+ Action Rom-Com Scrapes the Bottom of the Barrel

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Don’t even contemplate watching this stupid movie.

Ghosted, which premiered on Apple TV+ this past Friday, is an action rom-com starring Marilyn Monroe and Captain America…oops…I mean Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.

I feel conflicted in labeling the film an action romantic comedy because the action is decidedly derivative and dull, the romance flaccid and the comedy non-existent, but the film identifies itself as an action rom-com so I’m respecting its pronouns, so to speak.

The film does have a plot, although I’m not going to insult your intelligence by trying too hard to recount it as it’s so idiotic as to be insulting. The basics of it are that after a meet cute that isn’t cute, world-traveling woman-of-action Sadie (Ana de Armas) and needy, home body Cole (Chris Evans) have a whirlwind 24-hour romance, which is followed by a globe-hopping, fish-out-of-water, spy/action-adventure. It’s basically a Hallmark Movie with disturbing amounts of killing and some very bad action set pieces.

The film has a run time of 116 minutes that feel like 116 hours because the writing is an abomination, the acting atrocious and the action choreography and execution ridiculous. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln…oh…it was so bad that Mr. Lincoln would’ve shot himself in the head if John Wilkes Booth didn’t do him the favor first.

A major issue with Ghosted is that the core of the film is the relationship between Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, and they have absolutely zero chemistry. Although to be fair, this script is such crap that you could’ve put Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in this sack of shit and still would’ve stunk to high heaven.

De Armas at least has a light in her eyes and is obviously working hard to make the best of a bad situation, but Evans has such dead eyes and does such lifeless line readings the movie feels like a Weekend at Bernie’s reboot with de Armas dragging Evans’ corpse all over the world.

Evans, who made a name for himself playing Captain America in the Marvel movies, is such a buff buffoon one wonders how he got his famed physique while eating so many of his own boogers.

Hollywood has been trying forever to make Evans a movie star but the only thing that worked was the Captain America stuff because Captain America is just as bland as Evans.

Evans’s last two films are the instantaneously forgettable streaming duds Ghosted and The Gray Man, which might be the worst double-feature in the recent history of cinema. One can only hope that in short order some new meat-headed moron would take Evans’ place in Hollywood rolodex of dumb-ass hunks but you never know.

I actually felt bad for Ana de Armas watching this movie. Unlike Evans, she’s not a terrible actress…she’s not a good one either…but she deserves better than this.

It felt like the makers of this movie saw de Armas in the last James Bond movie, where she had a small but scintillating role as a sexy and silly CIA agent, and thought they’d try and replicate that energy. The problem though is that character was pretty paper thin and barely got us through ten minutes of screen time in Bond, so trying to put her on-screen for two hours in Ghosted is beyond a stretch.

Some movie stars and famous Marvel men, like Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie, show up in Ghosted in order to inject some life and laughs into the festivities, but not surprisingly that all falls as flat as Chris Evans’ sculpted abs.

The director of Ghosted is Dexter Fletcher, whose previous work includes the Elton John bio-pic Rocketman, which made me think that this movie should’ve starred Elton John and Debbie Harry for some random reason. At least then it would’ve been funny even if unintentionally so.

The writers of the film are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote the Deadpool movies, and Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who wrote a bunch of Marvel stuff. Reese and Wernick’s distinctive style is easy to spot in the movie, but with Evans and de Armas spouting it and not Ryan Reynolds, it all feels forced and fails.

Apple TV+ is desperate to be a player in the streaming world, which is sort of amusing since it’s a gigantic tech company but still can’t even develop a barely usable streaming site. Despite some occasional hits like Ted Lasso and Severance, Apple has done little to distinguish itself in the crowded streaming world.

Apple seems to not understand that we aren’t in Old Hollywood or even Hollywood of the 1970s, as their approach seems to be to get stars and put them in shitty movies and people will tune in regardless of quality. As an aside, Netlfix has the same approach except they don’t even use movie stars, they just throw any piece of shit up on their service because they need content.

If Apple wants to become a Hollywood player, and to be honest I don’t really understand why they would want to be, they’re going to have to use their tech bazillions to bully buy somebody else…like Netflix or Disney or God help us HBO Max/Discovery. Because the truth is churning out third-rate garbage like Ghosted with second-rate stars like Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, isn’t gonna move the needle for a fourth-rate streaming site like Apple TV+.

The bottom line is that Ghosted is garbage and wholly deserves to not only be ghosted, but blocked before first contact. Do yourself a favor and don’t even give this pile of shit a single second of your attention.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023