Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Tommy Shelby returns for a muddy and bloody showdown on the big screen | film

AAfter six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused an alarming rise in the wearing of flat caps among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a huge independent feature film, a muscle picture drenched in mud and blood. This is the film version of Steven Knight’s international small-screen hit, based on the real gangs who roamed Birmingham from the Victorian era through the 1900s. Cillian Murphy returns with his uniquely disturbing, almost visionless gaze as Tommy Shelby, the leader of a gang of Romani travellers, a man who turns his trauma in the trenches of World War I into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.

As we join the story a few years after the curtain last fell, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, and Tommy is the winter lion of crime. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham crime scene, which he has done so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Bucky Lee. Tommy is clearly exhausted and disgusted by it all, haunted by his own ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and his dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his final autobiography. (Sadly, we don’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a grouchy London agent or publisher.)

But a beautiful, attractive woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his dim-witted son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, now runs the Peaky Blinders, a new Generation Z group of flat caps raiding government armories for weapons that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn’t traitorous and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from an evil Nazi fifth columnist named Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency that will destroy the economy and make Blighty’s invasion easier. Didn’t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler would do to his Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, many of the country’s most posh and well-connected people didn’t either.)

Obviously Tommy is going to have to get down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very mature scene featuring soft-spoken Tommy in a bar full of loudmouthed idiots who are making a fool of him. “Who’s the faaaaack Tommy Shelby?” He mocks a member of the Hidden Squad, who has received a terrible education on this very subject.

In this movie, Tommy Shelby stands up against the Nazis, and he couldn’t be a more good guy. (Tommy has clearly put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was intent on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders.) War and Nazis are a big subject to tackle on the big screen, and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper push it with some enthusiasm as a kind of war movie on the home front, aided by their easily watchable lead. You probably have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, though Reverence for Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we already know about World War II crime syndicates. However, it is a surprisingly confident drama.