Streaming on: Sky / NOW
Episodes viewed: 8 of 8
Gangs Of London has always been best appreciated as an alternate-reality affair — a bit like John Wick, except people drive on the left and there’s no hotel for hitmen (though there may be an assassins-only greasy spoon we’ve not seen yet). In this London the roads are free of traffic, nobody uses public transport, and a bullet-spewing gang war can rage without being interrupted by the police, whose response times are apparently glacial. It’s a fantasy-crime slayground where anything can happen, as long as that “anything” is deadly serious (no jokes, no winks to the audience) and intensely, gratuitously violent. In short, if you’re willing to suspend disbelief, and aren’t squeamish, it’s a pugilistic hoot.
Despite another change of showrunners (South Korean director Kim Hong-Sun and lead writer/exec producer Peter McKenna taking over from Season 2’s Corin Hardy and Season 1’s Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery), this latest instalment doesn’t fahk with the formula. It retains an entertainingly high plot-twist turnover and a flagrant disregard for character survivability (warning: some big names will not make it to the end), while focusing more on inventive action sequences than credible dialogue or internal logic.
Ultraviolent highlights include a brutal fairground battle in Episode 1, a church-set bullet-fest during Episode 4, and Episode 5’s tense stalk-and-slay encounter in an empty office block, which peaks with one goon being throttled to death by a freshly severed umbilical cord while the killer’s new-born baby (self-delivered only minutes earlier) lies nearby. Kim might not quite match Evans and Flannery’s OTT flair (who can?), but there’s a reason he coined the phrase “blood opera”.
Peaks with one goon being throttled to death by a freshly severed umbilical cord.
Perhaps as a sign of the (dark) times, this season does introduce one new element: politics. This comes in the welcome form of N’Tia Miller as a coke-snorting London mayor who reasonably resolves that the best way to deal with her city’s gargantuan gang problem is to legalise drugs. It’s an interesting wrinkle, though any of this development’s ethical subtleties are of course bulldozed over by the show’s relentless quest for big, silly drama. The Wire, this ain’t.
Gangs newbie Miller is joined by Richard Dormer as shillelagh-waving caricature Cornelius (psychotic brother to Michelle Fairley’s icy matriarch Marian Wallace) and Bullet Train’s Andrew Koji as mystery moody hitman Zeek, this season’s wild card. But at the eye of the improbable storm remains Dìrísù, still reliably soulful-yet-edgy as ever-beleaguered punchbag extraordinaire Elliot, who becomes embroiled in a massive conspiracy connected to the deaths of his wife and child seven years earlier. Along the way, his friends will become his enemies, his enemies will become his friends and then his enemies again, and he will dish out — and receive — a lot of pain. Will he ever catch a break? Honestly, going by these eight episodes, we hope not.
