A key exchange occurs in the third episode of “Gangs of London,” the Sky Atlantic series aired in April this year and now streaming on AMC+; it’s a conversation between Elliot Finch (Sope Dirisu), an undercover cop embedded for two years as an enforcer for the Wallaces, the city’s most powerful organized crime family, and his handler, DI Vicky Chung (Jing Lusi). She wants to pull him out. He wants to move forward: The Wallaces are in turmoil following the killing of their patriarch, Finn (Colm Meaney), whose son, Sean (Joe Cole), is his unstable successor. Elliot surmises that under Sean’s leadership, the Wallace syndicate will fall into disarray, making for easier arrests and prosecutions. “If we’re lucky, this will get messy,” he tells Vicky. “Lucky?” she replies. “For whom?”
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The simple answer is “the audience.” “Gangs of London” does on television screens what Gareth Evans has been doing in movie theaters since the mid-2000s: Shatters spines, crack skulls, slash arteries, and in so many other creative ways, demonstrate the various ways in which the physical form can be broken down to its component parts with a couple of well-placed punches and kicks. Think of “Gangs of London” as a redo of “The Raid 2” conducted against the backdrop of the Big Smoke and with an expanded run time for telling stories of betrayal, loyalty, duty, and family drama; much of what makes “The Raid 2” works appears here too, but the shift in medium better suits what Evans means to accomplish in performing a study of gangster psychology married with a coterie of kinetic, ultra-violent fight scenes.
“Gangs of London” begins with Sean making an effigy out of a rando he suspects might have something, literally anything, to do with his dad’s death. He suspends the hapless schmuck from his feet by high-rise scaffolding, douses him with gas, strikes a match, and lets the laws of combustion do the heavy lifting. Evans starts the sequence off with his camera flipped upside down, which is where London ends up as Sean starts tearing apart the city to find Finn’s murderer—not only the person who pulled the trigger but the person who paid to have the trigger pulled, to begin with. The scene sets up the tone for “Gangs of London” with vicious economy. It’s classic Evans. He infuses the moment with humanity before taking all of that humanity away from his audience. The man begs Sean not to kill him. “What else can I do?” Sean says in his wavering reply. It’s as if the horror of this man’s death is inevitable, unavoidable even by Sean.
Evans’ work bends around emotional dynamics like that, whether in the “Raid” films, “Apostle,” his 2018 horror picture, or “Safe Haven,” his contribution to “V/H/S/2” in 2013. Given a massive cast and considerably more time for building plot, Evans is able to extend that dynamic and see it through across multiple arcs without shortchanging any of them. Chief among them, of course, is Elliot, effectively the Iko Uwais character here; he’s driven by an urgent need to topple the Wallaces, but toppling them means working for them, which means putting his life in danger on their behalf, and all the while attempting to care for his ailing father, Charlie (Jude Akuwudike), whenever he can spare a visit. He’s gentle in these rare glimpses behind the tough-guy exterior. It’s the tough guy exterior we get better acquainted with, but Evans goes out of his way to maintain Elliot’s innate compassion just so that we never forget it’s there.
This makes Elliot’s violence all the more compelling; he isn’t violent by nature, but man is he good at it. The big climactic bar brawl capping off the series premiere has been floating around YouTube for a while now and demonstrates in several minutes what Evans has made his name on: Storytelling through breathtaking, kinetically filmed brutality. Forget the “monster of the week” shows. “Gangs of London” is an “ass-whupping of the week” show. Evans doesn’t spoil viewers with scene after scene of people getting their bones turned to powder, because on TV that might actually be too much of a good thing. But when the gimbal rigs are on, each fight his team choreographs is as memorable as anything he’s done on film, both in terms of their peerless craftsmanship and their soul. Every fight scene here has clear movement, clear stakes, and a clear human element at play.
Like “The Raid 2,” “Gangs of London” is at its heart a story about sons and fathers: Elliot and Charlie, Sean and Finn, of course, but also Wallace allies like Nasir Afridi (Parth Thakerar) and Asif Afridi (Asif Raza Mir), Alex Dumani (Paapa Essiedu) and Ed Dumani (Lucian Msamati). Elliot wants to avoid ending up like Charlie; Nasir wants to go clean and separate himself from his dad’s corruption by campaigning for Mayor of London; Alex’s modern ideals clang against Ed’s. Of the lot, Sean is the only man trying to prove himself by outdoing his father entirely, not simply by doing something different. On the other end of the spectrum, Kinney Edwards (Mark Lewis Jones), leader of a pack of Welsh travelers, whose son Darren (Aled ap Steffan) shoots Finn in the show’s premiere. Kinney would do anything to keep Darren safe, but what he does to secure that safety is another matter entirely. Kill or be killed: That’s how people survive in this world.
As Kinney acts that lesson out, so too does Finn teach it to Sean in a grim childhood flashback, but neither of them is unique. Everyone’s out to spill the other guy’s blood in “Gangs of London” if it means staying alive. But Evans pays keen attention to what his characters lose by participating in that Darwinian contest. Frankly, he’s better at that than anyone else making action movies today. Without that heart, “Gangs of London” would just be another slickly made gangster entertainment. With it, it’s one of the best accomplishments of his career to date. [A]