Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ on Netflix, a Fitting Conclusion to the Stylish Rock ‘n’ Roll Gangster Saga

By John Serba

A beloved TV series returns, concludes and gestures to the future with Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (now on Netflix), the feature-length film that wraps the original BBC run with star Cillian Murphy, and puts a few bricks in the bridge to the pending sequel series. Creator Steven Knight penned the screenplay, leaping ahead from the series’ 1920s/30s setting to 1940, as the Nazis routinely drop bombs on Birmingham, the home of Murphy’s criminal gangster mastermind Tommy Shelby. While a few familiar below-the-line faces return, the movie gets a starry charisma injection with the casting of Barry Keoghan, Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Roth, and the result will almost certainly please longtime fans.  

PEAKY BLINDERS: THE IMMORTAL MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: A concentration camp in Germany. Prisoners work a printing press, inking up phony £5 notes. John Beckett (Roth) is a head floating through steam billowing from a train engine. His job is to aid the Nazis in distributing hundreds of millions of counterfeit bills throughout Britain, crippling the nation’s economy. “Heil fucking Hitler,” Beckett sneers, and then we cut to a weapons manufacturing plant in Birmingham, where the all-female worker staff cheerfully gets to work as if the explosions and air-raid sirens in the background are just the harmless sounds of children playing, or a gentle rainstorm. They all die in the middle of singing happy birthday to a coworker. It seems one of those bombs in the background was not in the background at all.

Somewhere in the far quieter countryside, Tommy Shelby (Murphy) sits at a typewriter. The mansion surrounding him is sad, dilapidated – and haunted. It wasn’t like that when he moved in, though. “I’m not alone when I’m alone,” he says in voiceover – he’s tormented by the long-overwhelming presence of death in his life, much of it dealt by his hand. His daughter is gone, his wife is gone, his brother is gone. He finds a red scarf that once belonged to his daughter on a tree limb. Curious. Where did it come from? He places it on his brother Arthur’s tombstone. He lives alone save for devoted henchman Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee), who shotguns a couple of pigeons for dinner. His sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) arrives and he meets her out at the gate, likely so she doesn’t see the sad, dilapidated life occurring inside it. She regrets to inform him that his son Duke (Keoghan) is leading the Peaky Blinders gangster squad with a brutal iron fist back in Birmingham, “Like it’s 1919,” she says. It’s ugly. But Tommy wants nothing to do with that. He’s out here now. Self-exiled. Writing a book. Leave him alone.

So what’s the curbstomping little SOB up to, anyway? Well, Duke steals munitions earmarked for the troops who are off fighting the Nazis, and snatches morphine from hospitals. Furthering his amoral selfishness, he meets with Beckett, who wants some help distributing the counterfeit cash, and Duke will get a big, fat payday for it. He agrees. He has no qualms committing treason. The world doesn’t care about Duke, therefore Duke doesn’t care about the world. Further encouragement for Tommy to get involved arrives in the form of Kaulo (Ferguson), a Romani spiritualist who’s the identical twin of Duke’s mother. She convinces him that the battle for Duke’s soul is worth waging, despite Tommy’s insisting, “I’m not that man anymore.” But when Duke’s actions are a threat to literal country and family? Well, just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. 

Photo: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What, the Godfather III reference wasn’t obvious enough for you? “I ain’t like that no more” was Clint Eastwood’s mantra in Unforgiven. Slot The Immortal Man next to similar good-but-not-great continuations of dormant series, e.g., Deadwood: The Movie, The Many Saints of Newark and El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. And the last time I saw Nazis bombing the Brits in a movie, it was Steve McQueen’s Blitz, and you likely screwed up by not watching it.  

Performance Worth Watching: Of course, in the time since the last season of Blinders, Murphy won an Oscar for Oppenheimer, so his heavy-duty presence and intensity is a given. As ever, Keoghan and Ferguson class up whatever joint they turn up in, although their performances seem more controlled, dampened a little maybe, thanks to the tonal machinations of this property.

Sex And Skin: Brief lady toplessness and a gauzy sex scene that shows us nothing. Nothing!

Photo: Robert Viglasky / © Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection

Our Take: The Immortal Man creates more ghosts for Tommy, but will it find a way to exorcise them, too? That’s the key question, and of course, no spoilers as to how ironic that movie title may end up being. Peaky Blinders was a somewhat anachronistic rock ‘n’ roll show set in a pre-rock ‘n’ roll period that worked extremely well as a variation on gangster sagas about power, control, family, the sliding scale of morality and rousing needle drops. The latter is a defining component that director Tom Harper (who helmed a few Blinders episodes, as well as the films Wild Rose and Heart of Stone) might’ve doled out a little more stingily, as the soundtrack too frequently swells into righteously energizing guitar riffs and punk beats, diluting their impact somewhat – but a downbeat remix of series theme ‘Red Right Hand’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the transformation of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ into roaring heavy metal punctuate key sequences with either introspective tones or fists in the air.

It’s not a surprise to see Knight and Harper build suspense until Tommy returns to his old handguns-and-hand-grenades self halfway through the film, for the sake of the fans and a little slice o’ redemption. Even he can’t abide by treason, especially considering his Romani roots and the Nazis’ targeting of gypsies. Murphy’s wide-eyed thousand-yard stare cuts through the mist and into the beyond as Tommy contemplates everything he’s done, the pain and havoc he’s wreaked, and we get a powerfully existential sense of the character’s sense of isolation and self-loathing that’s yin to the yang of the overarching for-king-and-country greater-good plot.

Not that the film is above putting Tommy and Duke in mud and shit in a pig corral, mind you; these men-of-the-streets can only go so high of mind and body, and Blinders wouldn’t be itself without such atmospheric and gritty action. Knight carefully arranges the thematic chess pieces for maximum drama: Tommy is the dark past. Duke is the future, which, as ever, could be bleak or bright. The mystic Kaulo is the link to all that defies the corporeal. And Beckett is the omnipresent, smiling banality of evil. They all meet in a slightly underwhelming dramatic climax – earlier action set pieces boast a bit more stylistic verve – but it will nevertheless satisfy fans looking for a bit more time with these characters, and a bit more closure. Before everyone moves on to the next phase of the IP, that is.

Our Call: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man isn’t likely to surpass the series’ status in the minds of fans – so few of these spinoffs of dormant franchises do. But it’s a fitting sendoff for Murphy/Tommy, the character you hate to love, and who might belong on the shortlist for the TV Villain Protagonist Hall of Fame. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.