Is Tommy Shelby immortal? It’s a question Peaky Blinders posed pretty often across its six seasons as Cillian Murphy’s haunted mob boss refused to die despite the best efforts of plenty of enemies (and often himself). In a meta sense, the answer is probably ‘yes’, the Shelby flat cap and skin fade making Tommy, alongside Harry Potter and the Gruffalo, one of the few truly indelible creations of British culture over the last 30 years. Now comes the Netflix-backed film finale, The Immortal Man, to put the hypothesis to the test in the world of the series itself, a hasty and wonky final mission for Tommy that spends a lot of time flailing but, eventually, arrives at a genuinely moving farewell.
With series creator Steven Knight back on script duties and season 1 director Tom Harper back behind the camera, The Immortal Man jumps six years on from the season 6 finale to 1940, with Birmingham being pounded by the Luftwaffe and Tommy rattling around in a mansion far from his home city. Smoking opium, seeing ghosts, and writing himself a memoir, he’s in full lion-in-winter mode, which is hardly a stretch for Murphy in this role, but is still played well. Inevitably, he’s summoned back to Small Heath when his estranged son Duke (now played by Barry Keoghan), an embittered agent of chaos, gets involved with British fascist/fifth-columnist Beckett (Tim Roth, having fun) and a plot to win the war for the Nazis by distributing counterfeit currency and crashing the British economy.
Structured like an ultra-compressed seventh season of the show rather than a full, standalone movie, The Immortal Man’s biggest issue by far is its pacing. Plotlines, relationships, and character beats all feel really, really rushed, which is a huge problem in building the complex, destructive dynamic between Tommy and Duke, which simply needed more time to work. There should be a devastating sins-of-the-father tragedy at this story’s heart, but it’s too thinly sketched to ever reach those heights.
This is exacerbated by the relative lack of returning faces from the show (which, to be fair, is due to a lot of them being dead), so there’s limited shorthand available to Knight and Harper to fill in the gaps of the last few years, while the new characters aren’t impactful enough. Rebecca Ferguson is completely wasted as a possibly prescient gypsy queen, popping up to be a bit witchy, take part in a poorly shot sex scene, and then kind of just disappear. It’s rare that I find a film too short, but this story is plainly better suited to six hours of TV than less than two hours of film.
And yet, when we get to the end, The Immortal Man sticks the landing with something approaching transcendence. All the best moments of the film up to this point are driven by its dark, mournfully folksy, thumpingly loud soundtrack, which rattles the bones far more than any of the writing or action and, with the best song of the film, our goodbye to the Shelby story is unforgettable. Are a perfect five minutes worth 100 deeply flawed ones? I think, just about, yes.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 