Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), the soulful sociopath and leader of the nattily dressed criminal gang known as the Peaky Blinders, has always seemed more myth than man. Through six richly imagined television seasons and multiple near-death experiences, Tommy, a traumatized World War I veteran, appeared indestructible. Now, six years after the series ended, its writer and creator Steven Knight and the director Tom Harper have gone all in on the character’s otherworldliness. With “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man,” they lean hard into Tommy’s Romany heritage to give us a movie filled with visions and memories, prophesy and portents. In other words, less swaggering machismo, more tortured self-examination.
We find Tommy in 1940, alone in a crumbling manor house outside Birmingham, haunted by the past and the jostling ghosts of the dead. To help exorcise them (and seal some plot holes for virgin viewers), he’s writing a memoir, while his childhood friend Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee) hovers like Jiminy Cricket, delivering dire warnings and helpful exposition in between watering the horses. He’s one of several bones thrown to fans, none of which treats have much narrative meat on them.
To coax Tommy out of his self-induced exile, we need an out-of-control family member and a villainous plot against the homeland. (Blood and country have always been Tommy’s main motivators.) For the first, there is Duke (Barry Keoghan), Tommy’s estranged son, now running the Peaky Blinders 2.0 with fewer scruples than Al Capone. And for the second, who better than the Nazis, who are planning to flood the British economy with counterfeit bank notes?
A major strength of the series has always been its positioning of women at the center of the action, and it’s up to two of them to convince Tommy to shed his woolly cardigan and climb back into his Peaky uniform: his sister, Ada (Sophie Rundle), now an M.P., and Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), the witchy sibling of Tommy’s long-gone Romany lover. Both are concerned about Duke, though Kaulo’s possibly magical powers of seduction might make her the more persuasive of the two.
At times, “The Immortal Man” is almost swallowed whole by its clichés — the reluctant hero responding to one last call; the father-son melodrama — and paper-thin characterizations, most egregiously of Duke. (His crucial alliance with a British fascist, played by a miscast Tim Roth, never feels as consequential as it should.) Yet there is warmth and generosity in the movie’s familiar, fan-pandering imagery: the Garrison pub, the unofficial Peaky clubhouse, proudly defying the Blitz; Tommy on his horse, clip–clopping through rubble-strewn streets while a remix of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s “Red Right Hand” guides him on.
Shooting in the North of England, the cinematographer George Steel, working with the production designer Jacqueline Abrahams, paints perfectly scarred dioramas of devastation. Steel’s magnificently tactile work was the backbone of the television series, bringing warehouses and waterways to vivid, resonant life and giving the characters a believable provenance. Even so, there’s a curious emptiness at the heart of “The Immortal Man” as it gestures busily to “High Noon” and the Bible, politics and war, bloodlines and destiny. In its quest to give us a little bit of everything, it finally delivers not nearly enough of anything.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Rated R for a fascist plot, a factory explosion and a fateful encounter with a hand grenade. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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