Ronan Bennett is good at making criminal work feel like a plausible way to get ahead. We recommend Top Boy for the attention it pays to ambition, though his writing can become slow and overfamiliar elsewhere.
Fi1m perspective
In Top Boy (2011), the people dealing drugs on a fictional East London estate have ambitions of their own, and Bennett allows those ambitions to make sense. We were unsettled by how readily we understood the attraction of the business, because his characters can want to succeed while knowing what they have to fear. The persistent gloom sometimes makes their choices feel decided in advance. Yet this remains the most persuasive of the Bennett programmes we have reviewed, because he gives those choices serious attention.
The earlier film work includes Face (1997), about armed robbery and community breakdown, and the screenplay for Michael Mann’s John Dillinger film Public Enemies (2009). With Top Boy, Bennett created a series that could spend longer examining the appeal of criminal work. His research and collaboration with actors and local people help establish the dialogue and settings. That is useful discipline for a crime writer: characters need reasons to speak beyond keeping the plot informed.
The later television work includes Gunpowder (2017) and The Day of the Jackal (2024), both as writer and creator, before MobLand (2025). Here Bennett and fellow writer Jez Butterworth build a sound premise around Tom Hardy’s fixer, whose professional obligations compete with family life. Criminal business feels like work that refuses to finish at a convenient hour. Hardy gives us a persuasive reason to stay, but the surrounding gangster material is too familiar to make this an unqualified recommendation.
The slow opening of MobLand leaves its cast doing too much between developments. Editors James Barham and Danny Salas are part of the team, though the pace is also a problem in the writing: Bennett and Butterworth devise entertaining complications without moving between them briskly enough. We would happily lose some of that waiting, since neither the threats nor the humour seem to need it. Start with Top Boy; save MobLand for an evening when Hardy is reason enough.
Biography
Ronan Bennett is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. Born on 14 January 1956 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he studied history at King's College London, where he completed a PhD in 1988. He began his writing career with novels including The Catastrophist (1998) and Havoc, in Its Third Year (2004), before moving into screenwriting.
Bennett is known for creating and writing the crime drama series Top Boy (2011–2023), for which he received a BAFTA award. His other credits include the screenplay for the film Public Enemies (2009), the miniseries Gunpowder (2017), and creating The Day of the Jackal (2024) and MobLand (2025).
