Peaky Blinders, which ran on the BBC in the U.K. and on Netflix in the U.S. for six seasons from 2013 to 2022, was one of my favorite shows of its time. I’d never claim it was one of the best—although at its highest heights it was very, very good—but I loved it because, during an era of more and more shows chasing “prestige” status and a growing arms race of streaming platforms willing to shower massive budgets on anyone who promised the next Sopranos or Mad Men, Peaky Blinders was always comfortable just being itself: a kick-ass gangster show set in post–World War I Birmingham, England, populated by an absurd array of incredible actors gleefully punching below their respective weights, with copious amounts of sex and drugs and violence, and even rock ’n’ roll, courtesy of the show’s anachronistic soundtrack. It wasn’t a show that chased plaudits like “necessary viewing” or even “smarter than you’d think,” and therein lay its pleasures. The series lost its way a bit down the home stretch, particularly in its final season, but it maintained a devoted viewership, and when plans were announced to tie the whole series off with a standalone movie, many fans were at least cautiously optimistic.
Now that movie, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, debuts on Netflix this Friday, after a short theatrical run, and it provides a coda that’s moving, fitfully thrilling, and ultimately rather frustrating, more of a piece with the show’s sputtering final seasons than its roaring earlier ones. The Immortal Man is set in 1940, with a title card informing us that we are smack in the middle of Operation Bernhard, a Nazi plot to flood England with counterfeit bank notes in order to destroy the British economy. (In true Peaky Blinders fashion, aside from the real-life premise, pretty much everything that comes next is made up.) Cillian Murphy reprises his role as Tommy Shelby alongside a generous handful of familiar faces from the original series, albeit mostly supporting players. (One exception is Sophie Rundle, who returns as Tommy’s leftist sister, Ada.) Added to the mix are a number of high-profile ringers, including Tim Roth as a high-placed Nazi mole, an astoundingly miscast Rebecca Ferguson as a bedeviling Romani mystic, and, most splashily, Barry Keoghan as Tommy’s illegitimate and impetuous son, Duke, who’s fallen in with Roth’s Big Bad.
The Immortal Man, which is written by series creator Steven Knight and directed by Tom Harper, has enough to recommend it: The performances are committed, the action sequences are customarily taut, and the story has enough juice to keep us interested, even if it’s a little derivative of The Godfather Part III. But the film also never really stops feeling both half-baked and oddly rushed. Such underdeveloped characters, and such small portions! Maybe it’s the fact that we’re accustomed to Peaky Blinders as a television show, one whose relatively brisk six-episode seasons (a standard order in the U.K.) gave it a sizable but restrained canvas that served as a bulwark against bloated storytelling tendencies. Then there’s the issue that a few of the series’ mainstays are missing in ways that feel unfulfilling, most notably Paul Anderson as Arthur Shelby Jr., Tommy’s combustible brother, who, we are quickly informed early in The Immortal Man, died in 1938. (The circumstances of Arthur’s demise provide an evolving plot point for the film; the real-life reasons for jettisoning the character may have had something to do with Anderson’s recent personal and legal troubles.)
It’s an odd state of affairs that The Immortal Man will thus probably be more satisfying for someone who hasn’t watched Peaky Blinders than it will be for fans of the show. It’s a competently made movie that can’t help but remind longtime devotees of everything that made the show so much fun at its zenith, and make us lament some of those absences here.
But here’s hoping it drives at least a few newcomers to seek out the original series.
For those uninitiated, Peaky Blinders opens in 1919, and follows the exploits of the titular crime syndicate (who were, in fact, real) and their leader, Tommy Shelby (who is absolutely not), as well as his siblings and extended family, who help him run the Birmingham underworld. It was a show full of big, swaggering characters with fantastic accents and the sort of improbable plot twists that made you shout expletives at your television.
The show’s final season was set in 1933, which meant that over its run, Peaky Blinders was able to tackle the aftermath of the First World War, the Irish Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the Great Depression, and the rise of European fascism (and quite a few other cataclysmic geopolitical events) in its relatively scant 36 episodes. The depth of its interest in these events is much closer to what you’d find in a Call of Duty video game than an episode of In Our Time, but that’s still deeper than a lot of gangster fare goes, and for American viewers it offers a refreshing viewpoint into a 1920s and 1930s context in which we tend to assume we were the main characters. (The notorious British fascist Oswald Mosley, for instance, is a central character in the show’s final seasons.) The show also boasted a (literal) murderers’ row of guest appearances, with the likes of Sam Neill, Paddy Considine, and Adrien Brody taking various turns as assorted Shelby-family antagonists. Tom Hardy’s scenery-devouring role as Tommy’s sometimes rival, sometimes collaborator Alfie Solomons is some of my favorite work the actor has ever done.
Alas, where Peaky Blinders ultimately ran aground, and where The Immortal Man can’t help but continue to founder, was the loss of Helen McCrory, who played Polly Gray, Tommy’s aunt and the series’ true linchpin. Cillian Murphy is a phenomenal actor and his Tommy Shelby is one of the more memorable creations in the annals of onscreen gangsterism, but by the show’s middle seasons, it was a role Murphy could perform in his sleep. McCrory’s flamboyant and perfectly drawn portrayal of Polly was the show’s real treasure, a steel-willed matriarch unusually attuned to the mysticism of the Shelby family’s Romani roots who also served as a ruthlessly pragmatic consigliere, equal parts Griselda Blanco and Tom Hagen. Even when Peaky Blinders veered into extravagant ridiculousness (which was often, even at its best), McCrory’s Polly was so electric that the show remained totally riveting any time she was onscreen.
McCrory died of cancer in 2021 at age 52; until news of her passing broke, she and her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, had kept her diagnosis extremely private. It’s unclear how much the Peaky Blinders brain trust knew of her prognosis—from interviews, it seems they were aware she was sick, but perhaps less aware of the severity. But it’s clear that the show’s cast and writers were devastated, and were left scrambling to figure out how to incorporate her absence into the show’s final season. They never really succeeded, and The Immortal Man is smart enough to not even try. Ultimately The Immortal Man made me acutely aware of everything I loved and miss about the original series; that may sound like a backhanded compliment, but there are far worse things a movie can do.