Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man 

(dir. Tom Harper)

By: Adam Freed

There is no shame in allowing television shows to end while there is still a little meat left on the bone.  In fact, there is quite a bit of honor in the type of restraint that it takes to do so.  As it turns out for Steven Knight’s iconic BBC production Peaky Blinders, the 36 episodes that ran from 2013-2022 was about as much of the early 20th century Birmingham organized crime syndicate as anyone needed.  The show’s explosion in popularity outside of the United Kingdom was mostly due to its purchase for distribution by Netflix, a deal that gave the violent family drama new life, but may have also cursed it to a fate that made its direct to streaming reprisal an inevitability.  Knight (Locke, Eastern Promises) is still at the heart of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, a series follow up film that few people asked for, and even fewer will feel captures the essence of what made the long running series the beloved artifact that it became.  Sure, spending a few more hours with Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer, 28 Days Later) as he reprises his role as Tommy Shelby, the cunning and feared leader of the Peaky Blinders, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly doesn’t outweigh the questionable necessity of the film’s story, which is an unfortunate mix of sparse and convoluted. 

The film’s central premise is anchored to a 1940 German plot to economically cripple England by introducing a massive influx of counterfeit cash into circulation.  The prevention of this questionable fascist scheme, becomes the anchor point to which Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man stakes its claim.  Director Tom Harper (Wild Rose, Heart of Stone) does very little to expand on the world outlined within the series, leaving his film adaptation feeling disappointingly smaller than the series itself.  Set seven years after the 1933 series finale, Tommy Shelby, now a reclusive aspiring author, has abandoned the city of Birmingham in addition to his bloody post as leader of the Peaky Blinders.  Shelby’s desertion leaves the crime family in the charge of his son Duke.  

Duke, the product of a sexual encounter that Shelby once had with a traveler woman by the name of Zelda, is captured in predictable manic fashion by Barry Keoghan (Saltburn, The Banshees of Inisherin).  While Keoghan’s inclusion in the film feels apt, it is his unwillingness to take chances as a performer that relegates his character to a predictable form of mania.  Under the demanding tutelage of directorial brilliance like Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of the Sacred Deer) and Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin), Keogan has pushed the boundaries of his performance capabilities, but here fills Duke only half way with purpose, leaving the violence and abandonment that his character experiences to be expressed as lines of expository dialogue rather than anything more substantial.  In Keoghan’s defense, the narrowness of Knight’s script leaves even the Academy Award Winning Murphy, twisting in static winds.  

While it must be conceded that a call sheet that adds Rebecca Ferguson (Dune: Part One, Mission Impossible: Fallout), Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight) and Stephen Graham (Snatch, Adolescence) to the aforementioned Murphy and Keoghan is enough to make audiences sit up and take notice, but it is the spartan nature of their existences within Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man that makes their inclusion all the more confounding.  Graham, who may be at the apex of his illustrious career thanks to his universally lauded Netflix drama Adolescence (2025) doesn’t appear within the film until well beyond its midpoint.  Peaky Blinders succeeded because it was the sprawling story of an embattled 19th century family.  Audiences were immersed into an industrialized world that was equal parts transportive and immersive.  With the vast majority of Tommy Shelby’s clan long gone, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is little more than a stripped down reminder of what once was.

Target Score 4.5/10 - Gone are the days of the bloody and beguiling Birmingham family street gang The Peaky Blinders.  In their place, Netflix and director Tom Harper have conjured a convoluted and narrowly plotted film that feels less like story evolution than it does audience exploitation.