MobLand season two review – why is Pierce Brosnan’s tedious crime drama so obsessed with testicle jokes?

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

In the middle of it all was Tom Hardy as the stoic fixer Harry Da Souza, lugging boxes of exposition from scene to scene while visibly longing to get back to his trailer. And who could blame him? For all its screeching wheels and strike-a-lighting cockneys, this was a terribly lacklustre affair: a propah front door (bore) that failed to generate much interest in either the characters or their Victoria Derbyshire’s Newsnight (plight).

Anyway, here we are again, blasting into the new series with a visit to a greyhound track for some combatively accented hijinks with Conrad and his similarly “Irish” wife Maeve (a horrifyingly miscast Helen Mirren). Having disposed of several (if, crucially, not all) members of the rival crime family the Stevensons, the Harrigans are now in the market for fresh adversaries.

Enter a Turkish mob composed largely of beards and excessive upper body strength. They are led by a man who looks like Mick Fleetwood, and Conrad doesn’t like them one bit, not least when they attempt to tell him “sweet little lies” about the fancy drug deal they’ve just reneged on. It seems they have bypassed Conrad in favour of a clandestine contract with wayward son Kevin (Paddy Considine). The nerve! What could it all mean?

Here’s Harry with some mixed metaphors: “This family is in a death spiral. We’ve lost fentanyl. Now heroin is swinging in the breeze. Instead of keeping our powder dry, we’ve started a war.” A pause, for effect. “Wiv our own allies.”

Could there be a shadowy “big bastard” behind it all? A shark, perhaps, circling the Harrigans, intent on “splitting this family into small pieces” and turning Conrad against his son?

Let us ponder this unpleasant question over 10 48-minute episodes, plus ad breaks.

Blimey, it’s dull. For all the guns and flying CGI viscera, it’s absent either the charm or wit that makes these sorts of fist-based capers bearable. The characters are all gits and their banter is as effortful as it is relentless. (There is the suspicion that production meetings involved liberal use of the word “craic”.)

The characters are all awful. Gag-wise, it’s strictly back-of-the-bus stuff. There is a preoccupation with balls and the misuse thereof. Conrad threatens to place one flunkey’s potatoes “on me fuckin’ mantlepiece,”, before promising another he’ll reduce him to “a bag o’ Turkish testicles”.

If you tweezered out all the swear words, the whole thing would collapse like a game of Jenga. All that would remain would be a steaming pile of fists and Hardy’s huge face squinting dolefully into the distance, like a satellite dish struggling to pick up some distant television signal.

At one point, apropos of nothing, Mirren shouts: “Dis tastes loike a tramp’s cock!” at a sausage. At another point, we’re given an unexplained closeup of a greyhound doing a wee on a racetrack. This feels like a metaphor, somehow. But for what? For the Harrigan family’s insistence on treating the world as their personal urinal, perhaps? Or for Ritchie continuing to take the proverbial? Jury’s out, squire.