Gangs of London
Season 2
Episode 1
Mewling mule munches munitions; murders mate
There was little doubt that Gangs of London would be renewed for a second season: it was a big hit for Sky Atlantic in 2020, to say nothing of the prestige it conferred upon production company Pulse Films.
What was less obvious was exactly what the continuation of the story would look like. The finale of Season 1 struck a good balance between conclusive and open-ended. The show’s inciting incident – the assassination of Finn Wallace – was satisfactorily resolved, and Sean Wallace’s arc arrived at a conclusion that felt natural and correct. The final moments of Season 1, Episode 9 indicated that Elliot Carter would step up as the show’s de facto protagonist, having inherited Sean’s cache of data incriminating the Investors, and a powerful motive to bring down the people who turned him into their on-call hitman. It was a compelling blockbuster sequel hook: a promise of higher stakes and bigger conflicts to come, while still leaving a lot of possibility space for what those conflicts might involve.
Sure enough, Season 2 entered production in summer of 2021, and its eight-episode run was released on broadcast TV and streaming services in October of 2022, roughly two-and-a-half years after Season 1. It wasn’t met with the same fanfare as Season 1: two-and-a-half years is a long time in the age of Peak TV, long enough to subsume all but the biggest shows beneath the tide of content. Critics were more lukewarm this time out, though still trending positive (Season 2 has an 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 16 reviews, compared to Season 1’s 91% based on 32 reviews). Viewership numbers are rather harder to come by online for Season 2 than they were for Season 1. Nevertheless, the series still seems to be an ongoing success for Sky and for Pulse; successful enough that production on a third season is well underway as of this writing.
Notably, Season 2 saw a change in the show’s core staff. The show’s creators, Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery, were no longer directly involved in the show’s production, although they retain “Created By” and “Executive Producer” credits. At the same time that Season 2 was filming, Evans and Flannery were elbow-deep in the production of Havoc, their Tom Hardy-starring crime thriller bankrolled by Netflix, which is still, incredibly, languishing in post-production purgatory here in May 2024.
In Evans’s place, Corin Hardy (no relation to Tom) stepped into the breach as lead director for Season 2 (“showrunner,” in the parlance of American TV). Having directed four of the nine episodes in Season 1, he was the obvious choice for whom to pass the sceptre and ensure continuity. In Season 2, Hardy is credited as director of a further four episodes (specifically, 1, 2, 7, and 8). At this point, he’s directed almost half of the show’s entire run: Gangs of London, by now, is as much Hardy’s baby as it ever was Evans’s or Flannery’s.
On this rewatch of the series, arriving at Season 2 a couple of weeks after Season 1 rather than a couple of years, I’m struck by just how well this first episode feels like a direct continuation from where we left off, slipping back into the same groove without missing a beat. After a “prevously on” montage, a title card situates us one year after the events of the Season 1 finale. We’re reintroduced to the show’s topsy-turvy London with an upside-down shot, the camera chasing a car as it charges through the pouring rain at night (echoing the first shot of the first season; also upside down, the camera retreating from the London skyline in the dim light of pre-dawn).
I’m struck by just how well this first episode feels like a direct continuation from where we left off, slipping back into the same groove without missing a beat.
The car is on its way to a rendezvous of Algerian smugglers, receiving a consignment of automatic weapons to be distributed throughout the city. The delivery is interrupted by the arrival of a third party; a group who are themselves heavily-armed, their faces concealed by balaclavas. Their leader, Koba, promptly shoots one of the gun-runners in the gut, and then instructs a second (Faz, played by Fady Elsayed) to swallow three rounds of smuggled ammunition, one after another. Faz obeys, streaming tears from the effort of choking the bullets down. With the pecking order firmly established, Koba orders him to shoot his other colleague in exchange for his life. Faz does so, and Koba honours his promise. The young Algerian is spared, so that he might serve as a living ultimatum to whoever is bringing heavy weapons into London without Koba’s permission.
It’s a pretty darn strong opening sequence for the season; disorienting, but effectively so. The first ten minutes of this 65-minute episode are spent in the company of completely new characters; the context for their conflict, and how it relates to the situation at the end of Season 1, will be steadily and methodically unveiled.
And it’s a pretty darn strong character-establishing moment. Koba will be a major player in Season 2; he’s the “arc villain,” in the parlance of the kind of shounen anime Gangs of London increasingly resembles. Played by Arab-American actor Waleed Zuaiter, he’s a character who could very easily come across as the wrong kind of camp, with his peroxide-white hair, and his fedora, and his burgundy tracksuit, and his vampiric Slavic accent. (He takes audible relish in pronouncing the name “Finn Wallace” as “Feen Vohl-aahsss”.) But Zuaiter makes it work, creating a character who’s over-the-top and entertaining, while still retaining an air of legitimate menace.
Where Leif was an attack dog, Koba is characterised more like a mediaeval papal inquisitor; louche, almost bored, in how he metes out his sadism.
Koba is in England at the behest of the Investors; to enforce their order upon the gangs of London who receive their patronage. I’m still a bit miffed that Leif seems to have been forgotten by the series’ plot: he was already acting as the Investors’ heavy in the field, and I think Mads Koudal’s absence from Season 2 is a missed opportunity. Then again, Koba is a different sort of heavy from Leif. Where Leif was an attack dog, Koba is characterised more like a mediaeval papal inquisitor; louche, almost bored, in how he metes out his sadism. He’s a zesty addition to the core cast.
Y’know who else is working for the Investors? Elliot. The year between Seasons 1 and 2 has been a hard time for him, acting as a kind of jet-setting international assassin on behalf of Ms. Kane. (There’s an interstitial graphic novel filling in the blanks, for anyone who cares to read it. Corin Hardy conceived the story; it’s very slight, and not very good, but it’s canon.) It that sounds glamorous, then Elliot strongly disagrees. He’s fallen into substance abuse to cope with the guilt and the constant threat to his father’s life, eliminating challengers to the Investors’ financial interests after having proven so effective in resolving the matter of Sean Wallace.
He’s reintroduced in an impressively nasty action sequence set in an Istanbul laundromat; a long dolly shot follows a trail of mutilated bodies into the back room, as visibly terrified henchmen are gunned down from offscreen. The sequence culminates in a vicious boss fight with his target, Abdullah Shafak (played by champion Lithuanian strongman Žydrūnas Savickas), resolved when Elliot wraps a sequined scarf around Shafak’s throat and tightens until the huge man’s eyes literally pop.
We’re treated to an extreme close-up of Savickas’s eyeball as it films over with blood. This is a shot that Hardy seems be quite proud of (it’s an image that he storyboarded by hand, as seen in the tie-in comic, and it’s given pride of place in Season 2’s red-band trailer. Hardy’s background is in horror movies, and his approach to stylised screen violence is notably different from Gareth Evans’s. Evans – who directed most of the close-quarters combat in Season 1 himself – tends to use bloodletting to accent his action scenes, to give them flair and grit and edge, but he usually doesn’t frame the mortification of the flesh for its own sake. Hardy’s close up on the rupturing eyeball is something that Evans wouldn’t do, I don’t think. It’s a shot with the sole function of grossing the audience out; of disgusting us with the spectacle of the human body breaking down. The eyeball shot gives us a preview of how Season 2’s approach to ultraviolence will differ from Season 1’s: it’s more florid about it; more baroque; more Grand Guignol.
The eyeball shot gives us a preview of how Season 2’s approach to ultraviolence will differ from Season 1’s: it’s more florid about it; more baroque; more Grand Guignol.
The fight with Shafak isn’t the episode’s action highlight, though. That comes towards the end, in an extended home-invasion set-piece starring Luan. In a tense conversation with Ed, it emerges that Luan was the one behind the imports of the guns in the opening scene; he’s looking to shore up his position as a boss in London, and get out from under Asif’s thumb, and the thumb of the Investors backing him. In answer to his treachery, Koba sends armed men to break into his new mansion in the dead of night.
It’s an excellent action set-piece; the best that Gangs of London has managed since Episode 5 of Season 1. The tension-building is exquisite, Hardy calling upon his experience as a director in the extended Conjuring-movie universe. There’s a tremendous, protracted sequence of Luan opening and closing the door of his fridge, while making a midnight snack. Behind him, a human-shaped shadow appears silhouetted against the drawn curtains; it wasn’t there before. An opening of the fridge; a swig of orange juice; a close of the fridge door; and it’s gone again.
Finally, of course, the masked invaders get inside the house. Orli Shuka reaffirms how good he is in the part of Luan, looking like a deer in headlights as he sequesters his wife and children in the house’s panic room, and then proceeding to kill the fuck out of the intruders in his home, by means of shotgun and sledgehammer.
Jude Poyer doesn’t return as action choreographer for Season 2 (he was also working on Evans’s Havoc while this was filming). In his place, Tim Connolly is credited as Supervising Stunt Coordinator. As an action guy, Connolly has a pretty robust CV: his career as a stuntman goes back to the early 90s, and prior to Gangs of London he’d had fight co-ordinator credits on shows like Titans, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Star Trek: Picard. If I was to characterise his style, I’d say that he places more emphasis on strangulation than Poyer; the Istanbul eye-pop notwithstanding, there are a couple of action beats in Luan’s home-invasion scene that derive tension from a character being in some way smothered or choked. These are less visually kinetic than Poyer’s striking-focused choreography, but they pair well with the claustrophobic, horror-inflected quality of Hardy’s action scenes.
As exciting as it is, however, it’s not the most memorable scene of the episode. That comes when Elliot confronts Alex.
Alex hasn’t been coping with life after Sean much better than Elliot has. He’s covertly sniffing coke in his office bathroom to get through presentations to clients. He’s haunted by visions of Sean crawling on the floor, pouring blood from the wound inflicted by the gun he brought to the Reno. Worst of all, he’s made himself a target for the Investors. The £200 million that he’s set out to launder is the same £200 million that Shafak was killed over. And, sure enough, Elliot appears in his penthouse like a vengeful phantom, holding a silenced pistol to Alex’s forehead, ready to extract reprisal for what the Investors are owed.
But he doesn’t shoot. Instead, he presents Alex with the flash drive he inherited from Sean back in Episode 9.
“We’ll blackmail the Investors?” Alex asks.
“And you’ll know how. Better than anyone,” Elliot replies.
It looks, for a moment, like a seed being sown; an alliance being forged. Elliot and Alex, both thralls of the Investors, united in the memory of how they failed at the Reno.
But Alex, broken by the past year, can’t bring himself to rise in rebellion. At this point, the Investors seem truly omnipotent, and if he was to try to push back against them, he would only be jeopardising the safety of his father, his sister, and his nephew. Rather than join forces with Elliot – before his would-be assassin can stop him – he throws himself off the balcony.
In hindsight, this is a reprise of the same trick that Hardy pulled off in the Season 1 finale: a moment of hope, where it looks like there’s a chance the heroes will unite against the Investors, only to turn around and cruelly rip that hope away from the viewer with the death of a major character. It’s effective the second time, simply because it’s unexpected that it would happen again this soon. Alex was never my favourite character in Gangs of London (Paapa Essiedu isn’t terrible or anything, but he’s definitely one of the more wooden performers in the main cast). But it’s still shocking to begin the season with a character – a character who was prominently featured in the pre-release marketing, no less – splattered across the pavement after a thirty-storey drop.
If Elliot wants to get out from under the Investors’ boot, he’s going to have to be a lot cleverer than that.
Season 2 doesn’t exactly start with a bang, so much as it eases the viewer back into a steady simmer. One of the great strengths of Season 1’s first episode was that it established a strong throughline: “who killed Finn Wallace, and why?”
No-one is safe, and no victory is easy. We’re back in the muck of this brutal world.
Season 2 doesn’t have anything to match that. “Who is supplying Luan with illicit firearms, and why?” just doesn’t have the same punch to it as an inciting incident. Much of this season’s first episode just feels like getting re-situated in this universe, catching up with characters we haven’t seen in a while, more than it does the outset of a dynamic and compelling story. Out of the gate, Season 2 doesn’t have a strong dramatic spine, like Season 1 did. It just has a loosely associated cluster of stuff happening at this point, without a clear indication of where it’s all going.
Still, this is a pretty solid reintroduction to the world of Gangs of London. Some intrigue; some gnarly action; one shocking death. No-one is safe, and no victory is easy. We’re back in the muck of this brutal world.
- Review Series: Gareth Evans
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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Andrew is a 2012 graduate of the University of Dundee, with an MA in English and Politics. He spent a lot of time at Uni watching decadently nerdy movies with his pals, and decided that would be his identity moving forward. He awards an extra point on The Goods ranking scale to any film featuring robots or martial arts. He also dabbles in writing fiction, which is assuredly lousy with robots and martial arts.