Six years after the events of the television series, Tommy Shelby is living in self-imposed exile, haunted by his past and struggling with a troubled conscience. The year is 1940, and the Second World War rages, but Tommy takes no interest, telling his sister Ada, “I have a war of my own inside my head.” However, when a bomb kills a previously unseen Shelby family member, Ada visits Tommy with more bad news: his sociopathic illegitimate son Duke has reformed the Peaky Blinders gang and is causing chaos in Birmingham.
Duke, played by Barry Keoghan, is even more ruthless than his father and is being courted by Beckett (Tim Roth), Treasurer of the British Union of Fascists. Beckett is orchestrating a plot to smuggle £350 million in fake bank notes into the UK, aiming to tank the British economy. Duke agrees to a 20% cut, but the deal comes with a deadly condition: he must kill his aunt Ada, who has been asking too many questions.
Tommy is eventually tempted out of retirement by Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), a Romany woman with psychic powers and the twin sister of Duke’s late mother. After a reunion and a brawl in pig manure, father and son enter an uneasy truce. The film builds to a race against time to stop Beckett’s plan, with the underlying question of how things will play out between Duke and Tommy.
Director Tom Harper’s film works well on its own terms, taking key themes of family, trust, and betrayal to their logical end in a father-and-son story with Oedipal overtones. While fans of the show will find familiar elements, including a subtle callback to Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” newcomers will not be overwhelmed by backstory. The wartime setting and grimy industrial atmosphere evoke boys’ own adventure comics, and the final showdown has shades of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns.
Cillian Murphy delivers an unexpectedly emotional performance as Tommy Shelby, even after 13 years and 36 episodes. The use of a memoir as a framing device is not particularly original, and the sight of Tommy typing on a canal barge is borderline laughable. But once he gets into gear, The Immortal Man is an entertaining slice of British pulp that knows exactly what it is.
