I will concede this to the flat capped and pocket watched fleet of Peaky Blinders zealots: there is something mightily compelling about watching Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby stride in slow motion through fog, suited and pistol bared, as Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten growls so loudly it threatens to shake the speakers off their perch.
He’s a character so embedded in British pop culture that in The Immortal Man, his feature-length swan song, when he encounters a soldier at a bar who spits out derisively, “who the f*** is Thomas Shelby?”, the whole cinema audience responded by hooting with laughter. Tommy responds by shoving a grenade down the man’s shirt.
The Immortal Man exists purely to spin out that mythology one more time, with Murphy having formally retired the role ahead of a new prequel series. Clearly it’s intended as a bridge between the two shows, though what it actually contributes in terms of thematic or narrative development is negligible. Season six already did the necessary work.
That said, Steven Knight’s small screen empire (from Peaky Blinders and Taboo to A Thousand Blows and House of Guinness) is united by a common vision: you can sloppily chip away at history all you like, but if it’s bombastic enough in its delivery, then it’s all the easier to surrender to its pleasures. And, when a Knight project is at its most enjoyable, it’s usually because he’s placed someone at its centre as formidably talented as Murphy.
Tommy Shelby is one of the actor’s cornerstone performances, because he can level all that early 20th-century Brummie crime boss braggadocio with the soul of an innate philosopher. In Murphy’s hands, it’s never mere macho stoicism – we fully understand Tommy as a man buckled by accumulated loss and violence. And he’s as good as ever in The Immortal Man, though he’s found a true successor in Barry Keoghan, taking over from Conrad Khan as Tommy’s illegitimate son, Erasmus “Duke” Shelby.
Keoghan’s swagger is more mischievous in nature, but he shares with Murphy the same ability to poke holes in his own charisma so we can glimpse at the vulnerability behind it. He’s a natural fit for Peaky Blinders. In fact, it’s a little too natural – Duke’s a cookie cutter Keoghan role, the rogue element who ends up humbled with his face down in the mud (literally this time).
Duke, in Tommy’s noted absence, is now in charge of the Peaky Blinders. The year is 1940. But as Tommy’s sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) warns, he’s running the gang like it’s “1919 again”. He was abandoned by his father (twice), so deems any form of allegiance as futile. He’ll happily steal munitions from the army and conspire with a fascist (Tim Roth’s Beckett) to help flood the British economy with forged notes, and potentially win the war for the Nazis, as long as he gets a decent pay cut.
There’s not much meat on the bones of Duke’s character there, and neither is there on Rebecca Ferguson’s mysterious Romany woman Kaulo, who crashes Tommy’s self-imposed exile out in a countryside mansion. He’s been busy chatting up ghosts of his dead loved ones, pausing occasionally to write a few more chapters of his autobiography and solemnly wear a turtleneck.
But Kaulo has her own connection to the other side (the film, as the series did before it, plays fast, loose, and carelessly with Romany culture) and she brings a message that will have Tommy slap back on the suit and the flat cap to ride out for a final mission. In slow motion. Through fog. While guitars scream in back (new music includes a slowed-down version of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand”, contributions by Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers, and two Massive Attack covers). What’s worked before works here just as well. Tommy Shelby persists.
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Dir: Tom Harper. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Roth, Sophie Rundle, Barry Keoghan, Stephen Graham. Cert 15, 112 minutes.
‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ is in cinemas from 6 March, and streams on Netflix from 20 March
