Gangs of London is frickin' fantastic for a very specific audience.
It's a solid British gangster show, which can be great television if you're into that kind of thing. It has a very Guy Ritchie sort of vibe, but this one has an element that I've never seen before.
In the very first episode, there's a fight scene that immediately made me Google the director because I was like "this is something different," so I wasn't surprised to find that although the director is Welsh, he's famous for making Indonesian martial arts movies. He introduced the martial art pencak silat to the film industry according to Wikipedia.
But it's more than the fight style that's distinctive. I have always enjoyed Asian cinema for how differently the plots play out from western movies, and that comes through in this show as well. Certain things will be built up in a way where in western tv and movies, you just know they will have critical plot importance, but in eastern media, that's often not the case.
This show is a very, very unusual blend of traditional British gangster show combined with some of the more unpredictable character arcs of eastern media. I really don't know where the plot is going a lot of the time, but not in a bad way.
There are A LOT of characters, and they're generally pretty well written for how little screen time any one character gets. Some are fairly one-dimensional, but their interpersonal dynamics are so complicated that this can be a blessing sometimes in trying to follow the plots and motivations.
What I enjoy the most is that the plot is about the intersection of illegal and legitimate business, how the main gangsters are also real estate titans. It's all about how they have each foot deeply entrenched into each side of business and how there isn't as much of a separation of legal and illegal industries as society would like to imagine.
Anyhoo, yeah, if you like Guy Ritchie stuff and enjoy really, ridiculously violent, but incredibly well choreographed and filmed combat scenes, this is the show for you.
