Rock’n’roll swagger, flat caps and pop history return as its writer and creator Steven Knight brings TV’s Peaky Blinders back for some rollicking high jinks. It’s 1940 and, reassembling the bones of the real-life Operation Bernhard, Knight gives us a Nazi plot to flood the UK with counterfeit cash via a disgruntled British fascist called Beckett (Tim Roth, glorious) and the rogue mobster and wannabe Blinders boss Duke Shelby — played in season six by Conrad Khan but here, in a flashy upgrade, by the Saltburn star Barry Keoghan.

Meanwhile Duke’s estranged father, the former Peaky leader Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), has retreated to his gothic Warwickshire mansion to write his memoirs and contend — sometimes literally — with the ghosts of his murderous past. The reference point here (and it’s a suitably bombastic nod from Knight) is The Godfather Part III. Tommy wrestles with debilitating guilt over a hugely significant (no spoilers) murder that occurs in the gap between between the final season of the series and the first scene of the film.

Making Tommy an aspiring author was probably a stretch and possibly reflects the obsessions of the rapaciously productive Knight (up next: Bond 26). But it does allow for some lovely lines about the PTSD still afflicting Great War veterans such as Tommy. “I came back from war and I brought war home in me head,” Murphy’s sad-eyed protagonist purrs. Yet as Rambo famously said — and as Knight has doubtlessly absorbed — “To survive a war you’ve got to become war.” And so Tommy is eventually called by destiny and a suspiciously convenient appointment with a lusty succubus played by Rebecca Ferguson (don’t ask) to return to the Peakies, slap some sense into Duke and — hopefully, fingers crossed — singlehandedly defeat the Nazi menace.

No, it’s not subtle. The rock soundtrack thumps along with propulsive vigour (cue original tracks from Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC and Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers), the screen pulses with stylish slow-mo from the director Tom Harper (Heart of Stone), while the top-tier acting duo of Murphy and Keoghan brings some unexpected poignancy to an otherwise familiar Oedipal clash. In the end it’s enough to know that this is a movie that opens with Tim Roth emerging from a cloud of locomotive steam and snarling at some Nazi goons, “Heil f***ing Hitler!”. Game on.
★★★★✩
15, 112min
In cinemas from Mar 6 and on Netflix from Mar 20

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