Netflix’s Guy Ritchie-style crime caper is the swaggering weekend binge to queue up now

If you know your Guy Ritchie films (and honestly, if you’re reading this you probably do), you know his sweet spot is that razor-sharp blend of grim laughs and violent, stylised mayhem. Alan Ford as Brick Top in 'Snatch' is the obvious yardstick here – a grinning sadist, waist-deep in corpses and pigs, with everyone else quietly desperate not to be the next snack. More recently, Ritchie’s been at it on telly too, cranking out 'MobLand' and 'The Gentlemen', both getting new seasons towards the end of 2026. Trouble is, that’s ages away in streaming terms. If you’re climbing the walls for something to scratch that very specific itch, Netflix has quietly snapped up just the thing: 'The Tourist'.

'The Tourist': Ritchie DNA All Over It

Here’s the gist. 'The Tourist', if you missed the slightly low-key hype the first time round, is a crime series created by Harry and Jack Williams (the lads who did 'The Missing'). It landed first on BBC One in early 2022, then HBO Max a bit later. The entire setup is a proper grabber: Jamie Dornan wakes up in some sun-blasted Australian hospital, memory wiped, no clue who he is or what he’s done to end up here. As you’d expect, things only get murkier from there, with the odd flashback, a trail of shady contacts, and a slowly emerging picture that suggests our nameless protagonist – credited only as 'The Man' – has more blood on his hands than he’d fancy.

To say too much would be a disservice, because honestly the show’s whole pleasure is piecing things together alongside Dornan’s confused outsider. There’s everything you’d want if you lean Ritchie: bursts of unrelenting violence next to awkward, darkly funny set pieces; a fish-out-of-water hero fumbling through criminal circles; and that sense of escalating, slightly tongue-in-cheek chaos. When it becomes obvious The Man’s dodgy as hell, you start spotting direct parallels with Ritchie’s mobsters – eccentric, dangerous, and plotted with a sly wink.

The format’s tight as anything: just two seasons, six episodes a pop, so a total of twelve proper, propulsive slices if you binge the lot. Pacing never drags, Dornan’s on best-ever form, and the violence is regularly broken up by these moments of sardonic levity that cut through the bloodshed. Critics were all over it – Rotten Tomatoes has the show sitting at a daftly high 96%.

The Big Swerve: From Aussie Dust to Irish Gloom

Now, about the second season – it’s almost an entirely different beast, and apparently there’s a real-world reason for that. Dornan, not wild about spending months on the other side of the globe away from his family, more or less nudged the show toward home soil. So, Season 2 ditches the outback and plonks The Man in foggy, rural Ireland. The device here is a letter from some old pal promising answers about his enigmatic past, which pulls him across continents into a much bleaker, rain-soaked world.

I’ll admit, not everyone who fell for the first season took to the new landscape, but the show doubles down on its weird, dark humour – and the violence goes absolutely feral. When The Man unearths even more history linking him to an Irish criminal network, it’s not a reach to see why this pairs so neatly with the vibes of 'MobLand'. The Irish connection is front and centre: organised crime, grim familial bonds, and vicious rivalries – the stuff Ritchie’s latest series chews on. Granted, 'MobLand' dials down the black comedy compared to 'The Gentlemen', while 'The Tourist' carves a path squarely between the two.

• The Tourist
  • Created by Harry and Jack Williams (of 'The Missing' fame)
  • Starring Jamie Dornan as 'The Man', an amnesiac stumbling into his own violent past
  • First aired 2022 on BBC One, then HBO Max; now streaming on Netflix
  • Two seasons, six episodes each (total: 12 episodes)
  • Season 1: Set in Australia, with the central mystery unfolding against the outback
  • Season 2: Relocated to Ireland, mixing in local criminal flavour and darker comic beats
  • Critically acclaimed (currently 96% on Rotten Tomatoes)

  One reviewer put it bluntly enough to sum up why it works:

  "It’s as if Guy Ritchie woke up in the outback, took several blows to the head, and started writing soap operas with a body count. Brilliant, stupid fun."

  If you’re filling the gap while waiting for new Ritchie scripts to drop, you’ll find 'The Tourist' lines up just right.