What it is about

Birmingham, 1940. The Blitz is tearing the city apart and Tommy Shelby is living in isolated, haunted retirement — writing his memoirs, tormented by visions of his dead daughter Ruby, company only from loyal Johnny Dogs. Then Ada arrives with news: his son Duke has gotten the Peaky Blinders tangled up in a Nazi counterfeiting plot. Seventy million pounds in fake British currency, designed to collapse the UK economy from within. Tommy, who has specifically decided to be done with all of this, reluctantly straps the flat cap back on.

The setup is serviceable. WWII-era Birmingham is visually competent and Tom Harper directs with a steady enough hand. When the film remembers what made the show great, it briefly catches fire.

What works

Cillian Murphy. That is genuinely the full list. The man is extraordinary — quiet, weathered, still capable of making a single look feel like a full monologue. His Tommy Shelby is older, broken in ways the show only hinted at, and Murphy plays every second of that with complete commitment. He finds new emotional layers in a character who, by all rights, should have become a caricature three seasons ago.

The final twenty minutes deliver a conclusion that lands with genuine weight. Tommy Shelby's death — at his own request, shot by his son — is earned and moving. If you came for closure, you receive it. Murphy makes sure of that entirely by himself.

Where it falls short

The villain is a significant problem. Tim Roth's Nazi agent John Beckett is introduced, established, and dispatched within 112 minutes, and the film never finds a reason to care about him beyond the plot mechanics he enables. Compare him to Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons or Sam Neill's Chester Campbell — characters who felt like they existed outside the scenes they appeared in. Beckett exists purely to be defeated.

Notable absences from the original cast are felt throughout and never adequately addressed. Several characters the audience spent years with are simply gone — mentioned once, mourned briefly, moved past. The emotional connective tissue of the show has been severed.

There is also a subplot involving Romani mysticism and a twin sister that feels like it arrived from a completely different, stranger film. One that might, frankly, have been more interesting than this one.

A word on Barry Keoghan

Barry Keoghan has recently been in the headlines saying he is tired of bullies criticising his looks. A fair and understandable frustration — and we will not be commenting on his appearance. We will however gently note that his performance as Duke Shelby is a separate matter entirely, and leave it at that.

The real issue: enough sequels

Here is what is happening in the entertainment industry and has been for years: everything good gets a sequel, a prequel, a spinoff, a reboot, a limited series revival, and a documentary about the making of the original. Peaky Blinders is simply the latest property to be fed into this machine.

The show was brilliant because Steven Knight built something with a clear arc — Tommy Shelby rising, Tommy Shelby at his peak, Tommy Shelby burning everything to the ground. That arc was complete. What The Immortal Man does is crack it back open, primarily to set up a Duke Shelby spinoff series centred on a character we have spent roughly forty minutes with across the entire franchise.

The critics love it at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience is split. We are firmly in the latter camp. Not because the film is incompetent, but because it should not exist. The best thing in it is Cillian Murphy saying goodbye to a character he has already said goodbye to, doing it beautifully, in service of a franchise that will now continue without him.