{"id":873863,"date":"2026-08-27T23:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T23:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873863\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T23:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T23:16:09","slug":"fightland-review-50-cents-farcical-boxing-show-is-featherweight-at-best-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873863\/","title":{"rendered":"Fightland review \u2013 50 Cent\u2019s farcical boxing show is featherweight at best | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that\u2019s like MobLand<\/a> 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 \u201c50 Cent\u201d 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\u2019s got will just about do, and hopes you\u2019ll distractedly say yes.<\/p>\n

Howard Charles is Maduka \u201cDuke\u201d Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything\u2019s going for him: he\u2019s 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\u2019s a risky goal given that Joy\u2019s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke\u2019s manager, who is also London\u2019s top drug dealer; we\u2019ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.<\/p>\n

Risky business \u2026 Deborah Ayorinde as Joy with Nicholas Pinnock as Kingsley. Photograph: Starz\/PA<\/p>\n

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\u2019s two heirs, who are a two-for-one cliche of a gangster patriarch\u2019s pampered adult children: Zeek (Charles Babalola) is weak, vain and impetuous, while Cece (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) is smart, ruthless and overlooked.<\/p>\n

\u2018A two for one cliche of a gangster patriarch\u2019s adult children\u2019 \u2026 Charles Babalola as Zeek and Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Cece with Pinnock as their father. Photograph: Fightland 2025 Starz\/PA<\/p>\n

The setup sounds simple enough, but Fightland fumbles it on account of its fundamental flaw, which is that nobody\u2019s motivation for anything is ever clear. Perhaps because it\u2019s 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\u2019t, although if there\u2019s 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, \u201cWait, why did they do that?\u201d or \u201cHang on, that isn\u2019t going to work because \u2026\u201d are in for a long, bruising slog.<\/p>\n

Fightland wants its violence, sex, bling, betrayals and bricks of illegal powder, and isn\u2019t too fussed how it gets there. Except, it\u2019s not interested enough in any of those things. If we\u2019re going to do a sex-and-violence crime caper, let\u2019s 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 \u2013 a duel to the death with a coked-up, machete-wielding strip club owner, for example, whose blade keeps clanging against the stage\u2019s chrome pole \u2013 before petering out. If you can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Drug Connect???\u2019 \u2026 Howard Charles as Duke Kilroy. Photograph: Fightland 2025 Starz\/PA<\/p>\n

Charles is a formidable presence but he\u2019s 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\u2019t attempt, or a knowingly camp romp, which it can\u2019t muster the energy for either. The script is deliberately funny on occasion, but so rarely that you almost question whether it is deliberate; it\u2019s not as unintentionally funny as you\u2019d hope, either, although Duke\u2019s homemade photoboard of the Marshalls and their acolytes, featuring the scrawled caption \u201cDRUG CONNECT??\u201d, is one highlight.<\/p>\n

Fightland moves quickly and smoothly enough that all this may not matter too much. Maybe Cece\u2019s 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\u2019s a featherweight contender.<\/p>\n

Fightland aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that\u2019s like MobLand but with boxing.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-873863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873863","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=873863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}