{"id":314615,"date":"2026-03-05T17:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T17:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/314615\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T17:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T17:29:07","slug":"peaky-blinders-the-immortal-man-review-tommy-shelby-returns-for-muddy-bloody-big-screen-showdown-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/314615\/","title":{"rendered":"Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review \u2013 Tommy Shelby returns for muddy, bloody big-screen showdown | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a hefty standalone feature film, a muscular picture swamped in mud and blood. This is the movie version of Steven Knight\u2019s global small-screen hit, based on the real-life gangs that swaggered through Birmingham from Victorian times until well into the 20th century. Cillian Murphy<\/a> returns with his uniquely unsettling, almost sightless stare as Tommy Shelby, family chieftain of a Romani-traveller gang, a man who has converted his trauma in the trenches of the first world war into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.<\/p>\n

As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain\u2019s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham<\/a> crime scene he did so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Packy Lee. Evidently wearied and sickened by it all, Tommy is haunted by his ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his definitive autobiography. (Sadly, we don\u2019t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)<\/p>\n

But a charismatic and beautiful woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson<\/a>, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his malign idiot son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, is now running the Peaky Blinders, a new gen-Z-style group of flatcappers raiding government armouries for guns that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn\u2019t disloyal and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from a sinister Nazi fifth-columnist called Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency which will destroy the economy and make Blighty easier to invade. Doesn\u2019t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler is going to do to his own Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, a lot of the poshest and most well-connected people in the land didn\u2019t either.)<\/p>\n

Clearly, Tommy is going to have to come down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very ripe scene in which soft-spoken Tommy turns up in the pub full of raucous idiots who cheek him. \u201cWho the faaaaaack is \u2018Tommy Shelby\u2019?\u201d sneers one lairy squaddie, who gets horribly schooled on that very subject.<\/p>\n

In this movie, Tommy Shelby is against the Nazis, and he can\u2019t get to be more of a good guy than that. (Tommy has evidently put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was dead set on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders<\/a>.) The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead. Maybe you have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, although this canonisation of Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we actually know of crime gangs in the second world war. Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama.<\/p>\n

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in out on 6 March in the UK and US, and on Netflix from 20 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-314615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}