Take that, Tarantino: how Gangs of London makes action scenes Hollywood would kill for

“The following programme contains scenes of very strong violence from the outset and throughout.” I’ll say it does. Part five of crime thriller Gangs Of London – which aired last night on Sky Atlantic – is one of the most thrillingly brutal episodes of TV ever made.

Even if you haven’t been following the series, which is all available on-demand, it’s well worth tuning in. Just heed the continuity announcer’s warning because it’s hardcore carnage. Those who have already binge-watched Gangs Of London have taken to Twitter to hail it as “hands down the greatest action episode I’ve seen on television”. It’s currently rated 9.6 out of 10 on IMDb.

For the first half-hour, it’s slow-burning build-up – albeit including a man stapling up his own wince-inducing stomach wounds and an unbearably tense gunpoint stand-off in a pub toilet. At the 32-minute mark, a punter suddenly shoots the publican in the head. And then the fun really begins, as a team of tooled-up, highly-trained Danish mercenaries lay siege to a remote farmhouse with orders to assassinate the residents.

Quivering with fear inside, quite understandably, is Darren (Aled ap Steffan) - a young Welsh traveller who was manipulated into murdering organised crime kingpin Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney) without realising who he was. This foolhardy act lit the touchpaper on the vicious London turf war that’s been played out for the past four episodes. Now, with the aid of a sniffer dog called Baxter, the mysterious masked militia have tracked him to this rural hideout.

As the 20-strong hit squad advance in flying-V formation, the odds look stacked against hapless Darren and his protectors. Except they’re way better prepared than they look. The house is a bullet factory, distributing weaponry to local gangs, so it’s heavily fortified.

A lever in the kitchen, if they can reach it without being shot, pulls down bulletproof shutters over every window. There are secret trapdoors and a cache of M15 assault rifles stashed inside the sofa. They might be outnumbered and outgunned but the tricked-out house means they can put up one hell of a fight. Cue the best, bloodiest and longest action sequence in a series stuffed with them.

The coldly clinical Danes use a retracting ladder to come down through the roof and C4 breaching charges to blow open the door. In retaliation, they’re met with an ear-ringing slo-mo grenade blast, improvised molotov cocktails and an unremitting hail of bullets. As floorboards splinter, windows shatter and blood sprays, it’s utter mayhem. A merciless action masterclass.

This perhaps isn’t surprising when you consider that it was all directed by Gareth Evans - the Welshman who has, over the past decade, been beating the Asians at their own martial arts game.

Evans cut his teeth on Indonesian documentaries before making the cult 2011 beat-‘em-up The Raid and its whiplash-speed 2014 sequel, which brought the country’s martial art of pencak silat to Western audiences. He’s now recognised as one of the world’s top orchestrators of screen ultra-violence.

His intimate action style is shot at close quarters, and relies on meticulous planning and precision staging. “We're quite specific even before we get to set,” he says. “We go through every single shot of the choreography, fitting the pieces of action together like a jigsaw. Some of the sequences we've done have been incredibly ambitious. We pushed to do it in a way that didn't feel compromised for TV.”

It’s not all about big budgets either. Evan has admitted that some of the pulpy flourishes are “absurdly cheap”. One pivotal moment in episode one's cleaver fight was achieved by having a crew member throw a cup of fake blood at breakout star Sope Dirisu's face.

This is Evans first foray into TV and he’s certainly made an impact. Co-creating the series with cinematographer Matt Flannery, who has shot all Evans’s previous features, he approached each episode like a movie-in-miniature. “It felt like we were making nine films that would form an over-arching story,” says Evans. “But episode five is where I got to really cut loose. It was one of the rare occasions where I was left pretty much alone to do what I wanted. I go a little bit grandiose with the unbroken last 20 minutes especially.”

Evans brings in all his expertise from the Raid franchise. The episode is impressively cinematic, complete with overhead tracking shots and visceral sound design. He happily admits it's his own spin on John Carpenter’s neo-noir Assault On Precinct 13. It also owes a debt to the climax of Skyfall, when Bond and Judi Dench’s M fight off villain Javier Bardem’s heavily-armed henchmen.

“This was my modern take on a Rio Bravo-type Western too,” says Evans. “I grew up watching cowboy movies with my dad. The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah was a major touchstone in terms of the rhythms and the inter-cutting. Especially upstairs in the loft, trying to find ways to evoke tension and know the right time for the gunfire to subside a little bit. There are pockets of overwhelming intensity, then we cut to silence and let the scene breathe for a bit. The home invasion stuff is also influenced by Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.”

Meanwhile, the self-sacrifice of Darren’s seemingly indestructible bodyguard Mal (Richard Harrington) looks East towards John Woo for inspiration. “Mal’s is a heroic bloodshed moment,” Evans tells us. “That was every inch of our Hong Kong influences. We were just like, ‘Let’s go crazy with Mal’”.

The action not only represents a breakaway from the show’s main timeline – chronologically, the events take place after episode two – but a breakaway from London, taking place mostly in Evans’s homeland. As an almost self-contained episode focusing on one specific conflict, fans have compared it to Game Of Thrones showstoppers such as Blackwater, Battle Of The Bastards and The Red Wedding.

Production designer Tom Pearce - who built an entire village for Evans’ period horror film Apostle - constructed the farmhouse from scratch. It’s actually three separate sets - ground-floor interior, loft interior and a rooftop deck, enabling Flannery to run along the roof behind the stuntmen with a handheld camera for dynamic immediacy.

One gut-lurchingly ingenious shot recreates the disorienting feeling of dropping into a war zone. The episode has a body count of 30 - more than a quarter of the 113 deaths across the series.

As head honcho, Evans had his pick of the nine episodes to direct. The other one he chose was the feature-length opener, setting the scene for a series that’s been called “The Godfather meets The Raid”. It opened in attention-seizing style with Sean Wallace (Joe Cole) - "a boy who would watch cities burn to prove he’s a man” - dangling a man from a skyscraper before setting him alight.

We learned that Sean was out to avenge the killing of his revered father Finn, whose untimely death had left a power vacuum in the London underworld. Ruthless rival gangs - Irish, Albanian, Somali, Nigerian, Turkish and Pakistani - were already fighting for supremacy. Not as unrealistic as it might sound, with Britain’s drugs trade worth £11 billion and an estimated 4,600 real-life gangs operating across the country.

"One of the things about London is that you hear between 10 and 15 different languages, and we wanted to explore the diversity of the city,” says Evans. To ensure authenticity, Evans and Flannery researched the capital’s real criminal underbelly, spending time with former undercover police officers, crime reporters and reformed criminals.

“We wanted to strip away the exotic eye-level view of London that people have,” says Evans. “We went down the rabbit hole to get a sense of what goes on behind closed doors. Everyone can relate to that one shop on every high street where the windows are soaped up and there's posters all over it. But what's behind that door? Who's in there? How can we explore that world?”

The epic power struggles unfold in what Evans calls a “Gothamized” London - a heightened world that’s both familiar and strange - as international factions fight to control the docks, drug-running, arms-dealing and money laundering.

Naturally, the pilot episode boasted not one but two outstanding set-piece fights. These were more about close-up, bone-crunching fisticuffs than the balletic, bullet-ridden farmhouse battle.

First we saw the show’s quiet enforcer Elliot Finch (Sope Dirisu) - a gangland footsoldier harbouring a secret - in a bar brawl with a difference. He proved his worth to Finn’s heir apparent by taking on a pub full of Albanian gangsters. Like a one-man army, he swiftly dispatched them using nothing but a dart, a glass ashtray and his lethal martial arts skills.

As if that wasn’t enough punishment, Elliot later faced off against a man-mountain known only as “Len the butcher” (Lee Charles) - wielding a meat cleaver, covered in blood and clad in nothing but underpants and boots. It’s a David vs Goliath battle which recalls James Bond vs Jaws, only with a swooshing blade instead of gnashing metal teeth.

Their brutal toe-to-toe prompted some squeamish viewers - including, randomly, Countryfile's Julia Bradbury - to switch off. However, plenty lapped it up. A total of 2.2m watched Gangs Of London’s launch episode within the first week, making it Sky Atlantic’s second biggest original drama launch ever behind Fortitude.

As word-of-mouth spreads, the numbers have grown. There have been over 17m downloads across the series so far, according to Sky's official figures, with a million viewers tearing through all nine episodes within the first fortnight. Overall, it’s second only to the multiple award-winning Chernobyl in the channel’s history.

With Chris Hemsworth thriller Extraction also going great guns on Netflix - its stuntman-turned-director Sam Hargrave’s non-stop action style has echoes of Evans’ - it seems viewers have acquired a taste for breathless blood-letting in lockdown.

Gangs Of London’s groundbreaking approach to action also represents a leap forward for small screen fight scenes. Over the past decade, they’ve evolved from sanitised stunts to far more grunting, gruesome fare in the likes of Game Of Thrones and Peaky Blinders. As the lines blur between TV and film, with talent moving freely between the two, its action styles are similarly converging.

The much-discussed one-shot corridor dust-ups of Marvel’s TV spin-off Daredevil were essentially a homage to South Korean revenge thriller Oldboy. As Evans’ name-checking of film directors demonstrates, he looks solely to cinema for inspiration. Gangs Of London shares more of an aesthetic with the John Wick and Jason Bourne films than any TV predecessors. The likes of Guy Ritchie and even Quentin Tarantino wish they could direct action this well.

There are more grisly thrills still to come. No spoilers for those watching Gangs Of London at broadcast pace but there’s a torture scene in episode six, a machete fight and eye-gouging in episode eight (directed by Xavier Gens and showcasing his French horror background) before an operatic cemetery stand-off in the twist-packed finale. There are faked deaths, real deaths and a game-changing twist involving a SIM card.

After that, a second series of Gangs Of London feels inevitable. It’s not only pulling in bumper ratings for Sky but sparking lots of social media buzz. No sequel has yet been officially announced but Evans has expressed an appetite to return, saying there’s “potential and space" for it. Scene-stealing star Sope Dirisu says there is "intent" to make more.

In the meantime, we can savour some of the most adrenalised action sequences ever seen on TV. Like the announcer says, very strong violence from the outset and throughout.

Gangs of London airs at 9pm Thursdays on Sky Atlantic. All nine episodes are available on-demand on Sky and Now TV