Gangs of London season two review: the blistering, balletic mob action-drama is back

Without a king, pawns scramble for advantage. The first season of Gangs of London – the blistering 2020 mob action-drama from Sky Atlantic – was an electrically violent struggle for power. The murder of Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney), head mafioso among London’s crime families, created a vacuum immediately filled by bloodshed. The series’ sinister twist was that none of the brutal in-fighting mattered at all. Behind the scenes, the city’s strings are pulled by invisible and all-powerful “Investors” – the real kings of the board.

That revelation compels Gangs of London to change shape in season two. Now, it’s a series about survival. It’s still plenty (and balletically) barbaric, but violence isn’t good for business. To that end, the Investors install an enforcer, the eccentric Koba (Waleed Zuaiter), whose brief is to get the bosses back in check. Just in case his villainy is in doubt, Koba polishes off his victim’s half-eaten sable cookie after his first on-screen kill.

It’s been two-and-a-half years since the last new episode of Gangs of London, a show so dusky and fast-paced that it was tricky to track who was winning from week to week. The second series mercifully kicks off with a generous “previously on…” supercut and a one-year time-jump that makes the finer plot points from season one obsolete.

When we arrive in London this time, Finn’s right-hand man, the imperiously elegant Ed Dumani (Lucian Msamati), and Asif Afridi Asif Astrani (Asif Raza Mir), head of the Pakistani crime family, appear to share the Investors’ favour. Ed’s son, the financier Alex Dumani (Paapa Essiedu), is the face of the family’s investment firm – a flashy glow-up that’s undermined by the fact that Alex’s luxe corporate suite is so obviously my old co-working space in The Shard. The undercover cop turned mob muscle Elliot (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù) is now in Istanbul, doing the Investors’ nefarious bidding.

Other season one favourites return quickly to the fray, including Orli Shuka as the enterprising Algerian boss Luan and Shannon (Pippa Bennett-Warner), Ed’s cop-killing daughter whose season one romantic entanglement with Elliot lent his shadowy anti-hero some much needed humanity. And, of course, there’s Finn’s jilted wife Marian, played by Michelle Fairley with the same cold cunning she brought to Catelyn Stark in Game of Thrones.

The series’ pleasures are unchanged by the years: impeccably choreographed fight scenes, quick-twitch pacing, and clever, immersive direction that takes suspense as its watchword. In a thrilling fight sequence set in a dry cleaners, for example, the camera trains tightly on Elliot’s face as he frantically searches for something to repurpose as a weapon. We don’t see what he sees – a gold beaded scarf hanging just below the hem of a disposable garment bag – until he yanks it into the frame and around his enemy’s neck.

But camera angles designed to ratchet up suspense can be disorienting. The show is also unflinchingly gruesome. In an early scene, Koba forces a foot-soldier to eat bullets. Later, we watch him strain to pass them (yuck). The murderous use to which characters put everyday objects, such as a meat fork, will make you uneasy walking the rooms of your own home.

“This is my city,” Alex says to the bathroom mirror. He repeats it to himself like a mantra, but not like a man who really believes it. He’s too smart to believe it. Times have changed on Gangs of London. These days, you don’t have to know the city to own it.