When I started watching MobLand, Guy Ritchie’s new London gangster drama featuring an all-star cast including Dame Helen Mirren, Tom Hardy and Pierce Brosnan, I initially thought the most ridiculous thing in it was the accents. There’s Brosnan’s preposterous “Irish” brogue for starters – even more inexplicable when you consider that the man actually is Irish – an amalgamation of every terrible “top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” impression you’ve ever heard, and arguably even worse than his much-mocked turn in the 1988 film Taffin. Then there’s Mirren’s equally scattergun attempt at convincing us she hails from the Emerald Isle, not to mention the myriad botched cockney dialects that frequently threaten to tip over into full Dick Van Dyke territory.
But before long, another element in the buzzy new Paramount show, centred around the Harrigan crime family, vied for top dog in the “suspend your disbelief” Olympics.
