'Land of the Mob': Tea and Murder

Watching the first episode of MobLand ( Skyshowtime ), I wondered how the mafia adapts to new technologies. Will AI take away a lot of their work ? Are they already using drones for trafficking? What will all those drug dealers and drug traffickers do once they're replaced by robots ? Does organized crime make sense if it becomes indistinguishable from politics?

These questions weren't suggested to me by the plot of the series itself , but by the redundancy of all its characters, all their adventures, all its settings and all its conflicts. MobLand is the typical masterpiece that becomes run-of-the-mill if you consider sixty years of cinema (from Enemy of the State , 1933 to Goodfellas ( 1993) and five or six legendary series (from The Wire to Breaking Bad , including The Sopranos ). It's a good copy of a good copy of a forgotten Italian original. Artificial Intelligence itself will soon make you your own impeccable mob series with just a few keystrokes on your computer.

The unique thing about MobLand is that it tries to bring us the best of English culture through streaming, mostly tea and murder . One would say that England or the United Kingdom has gone all out to sell its creative heritage. Thus, we have a James Bond as a mafia leader , Pierce Brosnan ; an action movie and superhero star as his right-hand enforcer, Tom Hardy . The opening curtain offers us a song by the trendy group, Fountaines DC, and in the interior scenes in strip clubs, the unsurpassed music of The Prodigy plays. They've also recruited Helen Mirren as the evil spouse and have put Guy Ritchie in charge of directing the whole thing . It seems like a team chosen by the Tourist Office to send to a posturing Olympics.

We have a James Bond as a mafia leader, Pierce Brosnan; an action movie star as his right-hand enforcer, Tom Hardy.

London's own mafias (as seen in Gangs of London ) also seem like national teams: "the Albanians, the Mexicans, the Colombians"… That's how MobLand refers to the city's various criminal gangs . Is there so much organized crime in London? What happened to English humor? We'd say English humor has been replaced by macho men dressed in black who are incapable of smiling even at a Mr. Bean gag.

The series rehashes an always interesting gangster cliché: the idiot son of the boss . In this case, it's Pierce Brosnan's grandson, so used to getting his way thanks to his family's coercive power that he stabs a guy in a nightclub. We already saw that the children of mobsters turn out to be dumb in Eastern Promises and The Godfather Part II. Every nepobaby is detestable, but if their parents can slit your throat, even more so.

The idea of ​​expanding the business also comes from The Godfather II . In Coppola's masterpiece , the question was whether to move from alcohol to hard drugs. In MobLand , they see fentanyl as a new product to trade illegally, destroying lives and becoming millionaires while leaving a few corpses in their wake. Sometimes (thanks to movies) we forget that the mafia is a rabble.

Every nepobaby is detestable, but if its parents can cut your throat, even more so

Pierce Brosnan is better preserved in his seventies than Tom Hardy is at 46. It's something I've been meaning to say: What happened to Tom Hardy? Normally, men "age like wine," but Tom Hardy, a Sumerian bull until two or three years ago, shows a devastating physical decline. Still, both act appropriately. Not so the actresses, who, since they've all had surgery , you can't tell if they're really acting or just reciting lines.

The only actress given a non-surgical role is Helen Mirren. But this is the already overused, diabolical, matriarchal female character. Livia Soprano , in short.

There's a lot of violence , and quite a bit of gore, but it's not choreographed in the way that's common in modern films and TV shows. It's a bit flat compared to John Wick or Gangs of London.

Furthermore, the series suggests that being a mobster consists of spending all day killing people , when even a mobster would quit his job if he had to murder four people every week. You become a mobster to kill if necessary, not to kill routinely. However, all the series and films assume that mobsters kill each other at every opportunity, which is absurd because then it wouldn't be worth it to become a mobster. The mob kills each other far less than we think (of course, that's just my opinion).

All in all, MobLand is very good, even though it's something you've seen a thousand times. There's a solidity , determination, and a truly remarkable criminal pulse in every episode. Ultimately, it achieves what's essential in a series about bad people : that you never assume a character will make it out alive.