{"id":837641,"date":"2026-07-31T07:05:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T07:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/837641\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T07:05:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T07:05:14","slug":"fightland-review-50-cents-london-set-starz-boxing-crime-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/837641\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Fightland’ Review: 50 Cent’s London-Set Starz Boxing\/Crime Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI\u2019m sure that Curtis \u201c50 Cent<\/a>\u201d Jackson and the team behind Starz<\/a>\u2018s new drama Fightland<\/a> have some appreciation for the worlds of professional boxing and London\u2019s criminal underbelly. But somewhere in the show\u2019s creative journey and the blending of British television veterans and scribes from inside Jackson\u2019s Power-verse<\/a>, a lot of the specificity vanished into the ether.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe series premiering on Starz is, more than anything else, blandly familiar, mining all the tropes of several popular genres without finding anything distinctive in the combination. More often than not, Fightland feels like a show made by people who watched a lot of other TV shows \u2014 Peaky Blinders, Mobland<\/a>, The Gentlemen<\/a>, Gangs of London, A Thousand Blows<\/a> and, naturally, Power all come frequently to mind \u2014 and not people with a specific passion for this milieu or these characters.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tFightland\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tFar from a knockout.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate: Friday, July 31 (Starz)
Cast: Howard Charles, Deborah Ayorinde, Charles Babalola, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Tahirah Sharif, Tyler Conte, Richard Pepple and Nicholas Pinnock
Creators: Daniel Fajemisin-Duncan & Marlon Smith and Damione Macedon & Raphael Jackson Jr.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIt can still be enjoyed on its generally broad terms, but Fightland is the first Starz show in memory that I\u2019ve felt needed to push its content to greater extremes; the material here demands more violence, more sex, more florid dialogue instead of this tepid, borderline-PG-13-level waltz through ostensibly rough moral terrain.<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward Charles stars as Duke Kilroy, a London-based boxer who, in the first scene of the pilot, is fighting for the heavyweight title in Las Vegas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDuke wins and it seems like his life\u2019s aspirations are coming together: He has a belt, an attractive girlfriend (Deborah Ayorinde\u2019s Joy) and plans to sign with a new promoter (Clarke Peters pops up a couple of times, adding only his inherent Clarke Peters-ness) and take his career to the next level.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe problem: That girlfriend is actually married to Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke\u2019s current manager. And Kingsley is a bad, bad man, using his boxing business as a front for an ascending drug empire run out of London.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe night of the title fight, Duke is attacked by two thugs who smash his hand with a hammer and, in the ensuing chaos, kill somebody close to him. Duke responds with an act of impulsive violence that leads to nearly eight years of incarceration.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuke is released and heads back to London seeking revenge. But when he gets there, he discovers that Kingsley has disappeared and his empire is being operated by Kingsley\u2019s son (Charles Babalola\u2019s Zeek) and daughter (Anita-Joy Uwajeh\u2019s Cebella), who are struggling to expand the reach of the family\u2019s boxing enterprise while holding together a loose criminal consortium of Russians, Irish and Albanians.<\/p>\n

\n\tFightland was created by Daniel Fajemisin-Duncan and Marlon Smith, whose resum\u00e9s include the British dramas Save Me and Run, and Damione Macedon & Raphael Jackson Jr. of Power and Genius: MLK\/X<\/a>. It\u2019s impossible to know how this collaborative process actually worked, but only Macedon and Jackson are credited as writers for the pilot, which has a very \u201cconnect the dots and don\u2019t ask too many questions\u201d sensibility when it comes to Duke, his legal circumstances and his motivations.<\/p>\n

\n\tCharles gives Duke an effective glowering intensity, but Duke\u2019s single-minded purpose gives the star very little else to play, and the series keeps pairing him with one-dimensional supporting players \u2014 starting with the one-dimensional cartel kingpin (Miguel \u00c1lvarez\u2019s Amado), who connects him to a single, one-dimensional cartel henchman (Sebasti\u00e1n Capit\u00e1n Viveros\u2019s Lazaro) operating out of London and aiming to topple Kingsley. I\u2019m not entirely sure that the stuff with Amado, Lazaro and the cartel is even necessary.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s right there in the title, but Fightland feels disengaged with the boxing side of the story, with pilot director Otto Bathurst delivering a brief, muscular bout in the opening moments before the various gyms and pugilism-centered spaces become mere backdrops for showdowns with an assortment of flatly written, cardboard gangsters with hammy accents. The boxing material, heightened by Cebella\u2019s attempts to bring sports betting to the U.K., is the part of Fightland that intrigues me most and the part that feels least like 10 other contemporary London crime dramas. But it\u2019s the part that\u2019s barely an afterthought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCharles has some good scenes with Richard Pepple as Gazzer, Duke\u2019s gym-owner father, but the relationship is underwritten, as is Duke\u2019s longtime friendship with Tyler Conti\u2019s Jay, who has his own demons that are only occasionally relevant as more than contrivance. The opportunity for the series to mine the geographic and linguistic contrast between the working class London of Duke\u2019s upbringing (and Gazzer\u2019s gym) and the more polished, ersatz business that Zeek and Cece are manufacturing as a front for their nefarious enterprise is largely lost.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe pilot sets up interesting tensions between Duke and surrogate father Kingsley and a livelier adversarial role for Pinnock, but Kingsley is gone for the majority of the six episodes (out of eight) sent to critics and Pinnock\u2019s absence is felt. Neither Zeek nor Cebella has a consistent enough character for them to work as adversaries on their own, and after the promising introduction, Joy is largely irrelevant to the drama other than introducing a plot point that the show treats as a surprise even if viewers will instantly guess long before its big reveal. Nor will viewers be surprised by the secret harbored by ring-girl Kim (Tahirah Sharif), whose interest in Duke is both predictably motivated and generally chemistry-free.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tActually, if you\u2019re waiting for anything in Fightland to surprise you, you\u2019ll have to stick around for the fifth episode, in which several characters who seemed like they were meant to be important (despite never being provided with personalities) are killed off in set pieces that are entertaining if never inspired. The plot of Fightland is straight out of Gangs of London, but the action scenes sadly are not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEven when people are being killed off willy-nilly, the violence is tepid and perfunctory \u2014 though less so than the various sex scenes, which all have the exact same structure, with a couple of chastely steamy close-ups, a generic R&B needle drop and a hasty cut to non-descript establishing shots of London. The series\u2019 blend of soapy melodramatics and rough-and-tumble underworld menace will be familiar to anybody who has watched Power, but Power and its spinoffs have always been confident in their only-for-adults depictions of adults-only situations. Fightland feels incongruously sanitized throughout, without actually being appropriate (or engaging) for all ages.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe end of the sixth episode suggests that the boxing might move back to the forefront in the rest of the season. If that leaves me speculating that Fightland could improve, chances are good I\u2019ll have forgotten every other detail in the series by the time I can watch those last two episodes. Lacking sufficient grit, intimacy and visceral impact, the show offers little to hold onto that isn\u2019t being done better on too many other current shows to list here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m sure that Curtis \u201c50 Cent\u201d Jackson and the team behind Starz\u2018s new drama Fightland have some appreciation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[21653,703,49,48,165739,200471,82,25271],"class_list":["post-837641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-50-cent","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-curtis-50-cent-jackson","tag-fightland","tag-sports","tag-starz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}