This City Is Ours review: The BBC's new gangster drama aims for Corleone and Macbeth, but misses the target

All the sharks in this Liverpool-set gangster-cum-family drama have Turkey teeth, one suspects, and in this first episode, not a great deal of baring goes on.

The 40s-style music points towards this tale of a crime family struggling to comes to terms with a passing of the torch and inter-generational struggles owing much to the Godfather trilogy, and it doesn't end there.

All the Scotty Road mafiosi put on their glad-rags for a happy occasion – a christening, rather than a wedding – and there is the tension between the children of the kingpin and the brutally efficient consigliere looking to move up in the world.

There are rats in the organisation, links to Europe and a tearaway son fond of running his mouth off.

There's even a Michael, torn between the criminal life he's always known and the desire to get out, to live a normal life and build a family with his girlfriend.

This is part of the problem with This City is Ours, the feeling that we've seen it all before. It's not helped by the fact we have seen it all before, and quite recently, in the Dublin-based crime drama Kin.

That also featured a family embroiled in the drugs business, an ageing patriarch losing his edge, a violent thug of a son and a central character who finds himself being pulled back in just when he thought he was getting out.

In Kin, however, you genuinely thought Charlie Cox's Michael Kinsella was conflicted about his role in the family's criminal activities.

In This City is Ours, Michael Kavanagh is played with a blank-faced menace by James Nelson-Joyce and you don't see that divided loyalty play out. His desire to start a family with girlfriend Diana (Hannah Onslow) seems less a matter of a guilty conscience and more that he can't believe his luck.

Meanwhile, the plot takes us efficiently – if rather mechanically – through all the beats of the traditional mafia drama.

The men swap banter at sporting activities in swanky clubs, while the gangsters' wives and girlfriends wear pastel athleisure and bitch about their husbands, echoing Karen's “thrown together and cheap” line from Goodfellas.

There are drug deals in sunny Spain, all terse and business-like, and the first hints of family disharmony to come.

Kingpin Ronnie (Sean Bean) is keen to step back and retire, which hints at a war of succession, and son Jamie (Jack McMullen) is certainly eager to step up – much to amusement of their Spanish connections who see Michael, Ronnie's loyal aide-de-camp, as the real power behind the throne.

Soon, a rat interrupts Ronnie's plans for his Costa del Sol retirement, and so Michael is tasked with finding out who it is, and dealing with the problem – something he seems unmoved by as he goes about his business with, let's fact it, shark-like economy.

Like Michael, This City Is Ours gets you from A to B with the minimum of fuss, smoothly and efficiently, but there's not so much to really grab the attention here.

It wants you to feel tension, but there are beats that don't sit right, with fart jokes and family dance routines sitting uneasily with the few sudden outbursts of violence, and you get the impression ifs all aiming for something higher than a run-of-the-mill gangster drama.

There's definite aiming for Shakespearean, not just with Ronnie's crisis of confidence – uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and all that – but also with the central relationship of Michael and Diana, which carries more than a hint of the Macbeths.

At the christening, Diana tells Michael: “Don't ever cut me out. Don't ever not tell me. You know what we've got materially is nice, I love it, but what we have as you and me is more.

“I'm not your bird, or your Miss World, I'm yours.”

Okay, so it's not exactly “screw your courage to the sticking place”, but you can definitely see the direction of travel.

This City is Ours wants to be a sweeping epic, but is just too smooth, too efficient, too machine-tooled to really grab hold of you.