‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ Review: Cillian Murphy In Spinoff

“Who the f*ck is Tommy Shelby?” It’s a fair question; at the beginning of this handsome feature-length outing for the BBC’s famously violent period gangster drama, even he doesn’t seem to know any more. Set six years after the last series, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man finds its antihero living in purgatory, far away from the public eye and dealing with a very troubled conscience.

Happily, however, Tom Harper’s movie isn’t equally weighted down by history. Though multiple characters from the show return, notably Oppenheimer Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy as the ice-cool Tommy, another destroyer of worlds, The Immortal Man works perfectly well on its own terms, taking its key themes — family, trust and betrayal — to their logical end in a father-and-son story with Oedipal overtones.

The year is 1940 and the Second World War is in full swing, coming to Birmingham with a bang when a bomb falls on a small arms factory, killing everyone including a previously unseen member of the Shelby family, Agnes (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis). Tommy’s sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) comes to his tumbledown mansion, where he lives alone with only his right-hand man for company, spending his days smoking opium and hunched over a typewriter writing his memoir. Still traumatized by the First World War and the fields of Flanders, Tommy takes no interest in the Second, telling Ada, “I have a war of my own inside my head.” But Ada has another reason to visit, and more bad news.

Crime abhors a vacuum, and in Tommy’s absence, the Peaky Blinders gang has reformed under the aegis of his sociopathic illegitimate son Duke (Barry Keoghan). Duke is even more ruthless than his father, behaving like “it’s 1919 all over again” (a reference to Tommy’s roots and postwar heyday) and thus a major embarrassment to Ada, now an MP in the city. The way he’s going, she tells Tommy, Duke will either be “hung by the law or lynched by the people.” But no, Tommy will not be moved, wallowing in grief for his young daughter and tormented by the death of his brother Arthur, ostensibly a suicide.

In the meantime, Duke is being courted by Beckett (Tim Roth), Treasurer of the British Union of Fascists. In league with the Nazis, Beckett is orchestrating a soft takeover of the UK by smuggling £350 million in fake bank notes into the country, a move that will tank the British economy. Though it amounts to high treason, Duke accepts the offer of a 20% cut, part of a deal that comes with serious strings attached: Duke must kill his aunt Ada, who has been asking too many questions lately and needs to be eliminated.

It’s only a matter of time before Tommy gets back into the game (“There’s only one man who can stop Duke Shelby, and that man is writing a f*cking book!”), but he is finally tempted out of retirement by Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), a Romany woman with psychic powers and the twin sister of Duke’s late mother. Kaulo succeeds where Ada failed, but Tommy’s return is not auspicious — indeed, half the faces at the Garrison Tavern, his old haunt, have no idea who he is, and when the old Tommy resurfaces, the moment is exquisite.

After reuniting, and an impressive brawl in pig sh*t that ruins Tommy’s fine tailoring, father and son enter into an uneasy truce, and while there’s a literal race against time to stop Beckett’s plan (“Everything’s happening at midnight!”), the underlying question is how things will play out between Duke and Tommy.

Fans of Steven Knight’s impeccably scripted show will find The Immortal Man familiar enough for comfort (Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” the show’s theme song, returns in a very subtle callback), but strangers won’t be too overwhelmed, either by backstory or the pre-existing relationships between so many established characters. The wartime setting may skew it towards an older audience, tapping into the boys’ own adventure comics of the ’50s and ’60s with titles like The Victor and The Hotspur, and despite the grimy industrial setting, there are even exotic shades of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns in its final showdown.

The show, however, belongs to Murphy, who brings an unexpectedly emotional flourish to the role, even after 13 years and 36 episodes. The use of a memoir as a framing device isn’t a particularly original idea, and the sight of Tommy continuing to tap away at the keyboard while riding on a canal barge is borderline laughable. But once he gets into (the) gear, The Immortal Man is an entertaining slice of British pulp that knows exactly what it is — and Murphy knows exactly what he’s doing in it. To paraphrase Bob Marley, if the cap fits, let him wear it.

Title: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Friday, March 6 (theatrical); March 20 (streaming)
Director: Tom Harper
Screenwriter: Steven Knight
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Roth, Stephen Graham, Sophie Rundle
Running time: 1 hr 52 mins