You couldn’t tear me away from watching Gangs of London. The AMC crime-action-drama, imported from the UK’s Sky Atlantic for American eyes, takes the best elements of no-frills B-cinema and dresses it up in the best prestige television clothes money can buy. At times it’s wildly serious and complicated, at times it’s unintentionally silly and simplistic. And all of the times, it’s addictive, gripping, unique, and jaw-dropping television. If you need a show to pummel you in the guts, Gangs of London is the one, innit?
Gangs of London is incited by one particularly violent falling of a domino. The king of a powerful crime syndicate played by Colm Meaney is dead. Long live Joe Cole, who plays the son, an impetuous and emotional heir to the throne less interested in maintaining his father’s business traditionally than bringing his father’s killers to justice. With this giant figurehead off the throne, and a new one squabbling and scheming in his place, every other member of the revolving door of London criminal enterprises — whether they’re biological family, found family, or straight-up rival — begins making their plays for power, violence, and quadruple crosses.
Narratively speaking, this simple inciting incident kicks off a plot and series of character motivations curiously stuck between knotted complexity and laughable simplicity. Beyond its obvious crime genre trappings, Game of Thrones is the comparative show I kept returning to; the central engine of “Grab and protect the throne” is the accessibly understandable Jenga piece on which a series of familial tensions, outside antagonists, and shifting allegiances sit upon precariously. At times during the five of nine episodes offered for review, it was exhausting to keep up with all of these characters’ chess moves within an individual episode, let alone as a season-long arc. But if you approach the show with the knowledge that you’ll really need to keep track and tabs in a way you might not for another actioner (and maybe return to the Wikipedia page as a helpful viewing compendium), you will find some atypically rewarding dividends from the genre. One episode centered around a dinner party ends with an image I can’t stop thinking about, its power coming from its “jump in the deep end without a floatation device” approach to its characters and their relationships.
On the other hand… I could not stop laughing at the wildly simplistic portrayal of Cole’s character. It’s helpful, I suppose, to have a central character whose motivation is so easily understandable — “Find my dad’s killers!” — as a base reality for the more complicated stuff to bounce off of. But this seems to be all the show is interested in communicating about him, down to his lines’ explicit text repeating this central idea — ”Find my dad’s killers!” — over and over again. Cole does an admirable job trying to find an inner life within this single-minded puppy of a character, but his overworked performance crossed with an underworked script results in unintentional comedy more than it should. One episode’s usage of flashback goes a long way in communicating the “why” of his goal, but I sincerely hope the remaining episodes give him a richer set of traits to play soon, especially given his shallowness compared to the depth of the characters surrounding him.
Of these other performers and characters, I am the most naturally drawn to Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, who plays a recent low-level ladder-climber addition to Cole’s crime family, before the show reveals something even richer and more interesting about him. Dìrísù gets a ton of shades to play with, from blunt survival to spontaneous manipulation to even out-and-out lust, and he approaches it all with nuance and endearment. A large chunk of this goodwill comes from the screenplay; his character is given details designed to make him a more appealing character than even Cole, and as the season seemed to orient around him more and more, I couldn’t help but wonder if they were planning a Season 2 (already greenlit) focus on him instead, Sean-Bean-to-Kit-Harington-in-GoT style.
Dìrísù also gets to center many of the show’s beyond-intense action sequences, which is to say, holy shit are this show’s action sequences absolute marvels to experience. You’ll tend to get about one show-stopper of a fight scene per episode (with two in the two-hour premiere), and I think this is the right pace; the show’s patient dissemination of brawls stop the viewer from being exhausted, makes sure they remain special, and gives them the necessary emotional depth and import due to the setup experienced before. Obviously, The Raid’s Gareth Evans, a co-creator and director on the show, is going to give you the goods and then some, and if you dug that film’s usage of kinetic camerawork, longer than expected takes, blunt depictions of violence, and visceral examinations of the human body’s limitations, you will dig the mayhem in Gangs of London.
But in their positioning as “a climax to a complicated TV series plotting” rather than “the main event of a simplistic feature film plotting,” these sequences feel arguably more vital than those in his films, almost framing Gangs of London as a musical; that old adage about “singing when mere words will no longer suffice” applies here, you just gotta replace “singing” with “annihilating.” Evans and his team are not afraid to dive headfirst into the muck for these sequences, often achieving a horror-tinged level of disgust and brutality in their designs, and it ensures the show sits head-and-shoulders above the pack from sheer shock factor alone.
Nonetheless, I could see Gangs of London being a bit of a hate-it-or-love-it affair for many folks. If you’re down with its peculiar cocktail of Scorsese-esque crime, Martin-esque power dynamics, and, well, Evans-esque action, you will take to Gangs of London like its fists take to broken body parts. But if any part of this sounds too ill-fitting, mish-mashy, or brutal — heck, if you couldn’t stomach me mentioning broken body parts — this acquired taste might not be for you. As for me, I couldn’t get enough of the sucker, and I cannot wait to see where this daffy, dense, and straight-up disturbing series takes us next.
Grade: B+
Gangs of London airs Sunday nights at 10pm on AMC.