Having killed his brother Arthur with his bare hands, gypsy Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) retires from his position as a crime lord. Two years later, in 1940, Tommy’s sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) comes to his house with news of social unrest in Birmingham. Tommy’s successor and son Duke (Barry Keoghan) is causing havoc across the city, and she intends to have him arrested. Before justice is served, Ada is murdered by Nazi sympathiser John Beckett (Tim Roth), forcing the erstwhile mob boss to take part in a gang-war that could be his last.
A spinoff from the six-part BBC serial, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man follows a structure that is fairly similar to the one used in No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021), Daniel Craig’s swansong as James Bond. In both movies, formidable warriors have retired for pastures new, and only the lure of family can take them out of this slumber. In Tommy’s case, he is visited by palm reader Kaulo Chiriklo (Rebecca Ferguson), a woman who promises him peace if he takes up arms for the final time. He prophesises about death, and is haunted by Ada’s ghost.
Murphy struggles with the more fantastical elements of the character. The television series hinted at esotericism, but in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Tommy is practically a clairvoyant. Murphy isn’t fully able to pull off this leap of character. Keoghan and Ferguson are guilty of leaping between accents: the former being Irish in one scene, Liverpool the next. Ferguson sounds so garbled in certain areas that it requires attentive listening from the audience to keep up. Roth is the only one most committed to the role. Mercifully, he doesn’t do an affected German accent. Instead, Roth plays Beckett as a commoner mocked by the English upper classes, and his allegiance to the Nazi party is in part to rid the “toffs” from their seats.
Director Tom Harper cut his teeth with Murphy and writer Steven Knight on the BBC show. Despite a bigger budget, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man feels like it was made for the small screen. Harper loses all sense of geography during a gun fight between the gypsies and the Germans, jumping from one manic set-piece to the next. In the course of the edit, it’s impossible to make out who survived and who was riddled with bullets. Being the only action spectacle in the film, it’s very disappointing to report that it’s handled with the freneticism and fury of a low-budget television movie.
Anyone unfamiliar with the show will be lost, as Harper makes no effort to re-introduce the established protagonists to a new audience. The most interesting angle, Tommy’s post-traumatic stress disorder, is examined within the first half hour, just before it’s swiftly forgotten. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man boasts a clumsy montage in which Tommy dresses himself in finery, like a superhero trying on his costume for the first time in a decade. This creative choice is a questionable one.
There is pathos: Ada’s death is tastefully shon, and it will move viewers unfamiliar with the source material. Irish folk band Lankum and Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten recorded a fragile rendition of Hunting the Wren for the soundtrack, a decision that aids some of the thematic undertones. Elsewhere, the torrent of punk rock tracks feels at odds with the time period, much as a combative tete-a-tete between Tommy and Duke. The duel is resolved too quickly, contrary to the tension that has built between the pair. Overall, this is neither a satisfying conclusion to a franchise nor an especially enjoyable to sit-through.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in cinemas on Friday, March 6th, and on Netflix the following week.
