Hardy, Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Paddy Considine are well and truly phoning it in in this gangland drama that’s a total throwback to the 90s – with the awful cockney accents to match
Lots of people wish it were still the 1990s. You’d expect that Tony Blair does, and Tim Lovejoy probably does, and the guy from Babylon 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+ series MobLand.
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 the name of a 90s boyband.
