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This boxing drama wants its sex, drugs, bling and violence – but isn’t willing or naughty enough to truly go for it. Instead, it ends up as just a long, bruising slog
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Television & radio — Jack Seale
Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that’s like MobLand but with boxing. That they have gone with that as the title of the new show from G-Unit Film & Television, the production company founded by the rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, is an immediate warning that this is not a series that bursts with originality, passion or technical finesse. At best, Fightland asks whether what it’s got will just about do, and hopes you’ll distractedly say yes.
Howard Charles is Maduka “Duke” Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything’s going for him: he’s the champ and Joy (Deborah Ayorinde), the woman he enjoys a post-bout warmdown with on the silk sheets of a penthouse suite, seems receptive to his plan to take their relationship further. It’s a risky goal given that Joy’s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke’s manager, who is also London’s top drug dealer; we’ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.
Sure enough, later that evening Duke is set on by goons, presumably hired by Kingsley after discovering that his golden boy has double-crossed him. The resulting fracas leaves Duke bereaved and, after he fights back a little too much, in prison. On his release six years later, he returns to London, bent on revenge. His plan is to pose as a penitent lost son, rejoin the Marshall crime/boxing family and bring it down from the inside. But Kingsley has gone awol, so instead Duke is up against the big man’s two heirs, who are a two-for-one cliche of a gangster patriarch’s pampered adult children: Zeek (Charles Babalola) is weak, vain and impetuous, while Cece (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) is smart, ruthless and overlooked.
The setup sounds simple enough, but Fightland fumbles it on account of its fundamental flaw, which is that nobody’s motivation for anything is ever clear. Perhaps because it’s banking a big twist for the back half of the season, the show is coy to the point of outright confusion on who knows what about the affair and the attack on Duke, what the repercussions of his imprisonment were, and where Kingsley might be. In scenes in which characters ought to discuss these things, they awkwardly don’t, although if there’s a plot point the show wants to remind us of, oh boy does it crowbar that into the dialogue. You are evidently meant to let it wash over you; viewers who have a tendency to say, “Wait, why did they do that?” or “Hang on, that isn’t going to work because …” are in for a long, bruising slog.
Fightland wants its violence, sex, bling, betrayals and bricks of illegal powder, and isn’t too fussed how it gets there. Except, it’s not interested enough in any of those things. If we’re going to do a sex-and-violence crime caper, let’s get properly naughty with it. But Fightland has almost no bedroom mojo and the fight scenes are perfunctory and weirdly short. They often offer tantalising premises – a duel to the death with a coked-up, machete-wielding strip club owner, for example, whose blade keeps clanging against the stage’s chrome pole – before petering out. If you can’t be excellent, at least be excessive; Fightland constantly holds back. Even boxing, which offers all kinds of ready-made metaphors for the power games played by businesspeople and criminal kingpins, is relegated to the background. The scenes in boxing gyms could be taking place anywhere.
Charles is a formidable presence but he’s far too good for this material, as is Pinnock, which makes the decision to quickly remove the latter from the action even more bewildering. They are both more than capable of fronting a rich, layered character drama, which Fightland doesn’t attempt, or a knowingly camp romp, which it can’t muster the energy for either. The script is deliberately funny on occasion, but so rarely that you almost question whether it is deliberate; it’s not as unintentionally funny as you’d hope, either, although Duke’s homemade photoboard of the Marshalls and their acolytes, featuring the scrawled caption “DRUG CONNECT??”, is one highlight.
Fightland moves quickly and smoothly enough that all this may not matter too much. Maybe Cece’s nonsensical plan to make millions by introducing casino sportsbooks to the UK, a country that already has an established betting shop/online bookmaker industry, will somehow work. Maybe the South American cartel Duke is in league with will conquer London, despite their British operation apparently consisting entirely of Duke and one guy they have sent over. Maybe Fightland will survive and be allowed to rumble on for three or four seasons. But it’s a featherweight contender.
• Fightland aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now
Howard Charles is Maduka “Duke” Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything’s going for him: he’s the champ and Joy (Deborah Ayorinde), the woman he enjoys a post-bout warmdown with on the silk sheets of a penthouse suite, seems receptive to his plan to take their relationship further. It’s a risky goal given that Joy’s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke’s manager, who is also London’s top drug dealer; we’ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Jack Seale. Published 27 Aug 2026, 09:05 pm.
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