At its heart, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a one-last-job movie: a man with a particular set of skills dragged back into the fray when all he wants is peace. Family is the Achilles’ heel that always pulls One Last Jobs heroes back in. In this world, you’re never truly free until the box office says you are. Just ask Liam Neeson.
The Immortal Man follows the OLJ template to the letter. In Tommy’s case, his son Duke (Barry Keoghan) needs saving. He just doesn’t know it yet. So off Tommy trots—with a gentle push from a mystical sex witch—back to Birmingham and straight into The Garrison pub, where a party is in full swing.
He creates his own record-scratch moment by lifting the needle from the record himself. Silence, confusion, and then…
“Who the fuck is Tommy Shelby?” sneers one unfortunate squaddie upon the announcement that this flat-capped enigma is, ladies and gentlemen, Tommy fucking Shelby. He is, of course, played by Cillian Murphy.
Calm as a pig in mud, Tommy invites the room to explain who he is. No answer. The few who know crouch slowly behind the bar. So, Tommy does what Tommy does best, and schools him in an ancient language that needs no translating: a live grenade popped down the shirt. Everyone panics, sneering idiot bolts outside, bang.
Then, later, when Tommy tracks Duke down to the pigsty... they fight like a pair of kung-fu drunken masters staggering and swooning about in the mud.
I've said this before, but it reminded me of the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, which ends with an estranged father and son "kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer" (incidentally, in a different way, it also reminded me of the mud fight scene in the 2003 movie National Lampoon’s Thanksgiving Family Reunion).
By the end of the fight, to paraphrase Cash, Duke calls him a pa and Tommy calls him a son, and they "both came away with a different point of view".
Both are wonderful scenes—the two best moments in the movie. Because that, I think, is where Peaky Blinders feels most at home: on that razor-thin line between menace and absurdity.
Peaky Blinders mustn’t take itself too seriously or the whole thing starts to wobble, and the accent starts to slip (a fate, alas, that befalls more than one actor here) and suddenly you’re stranded somewhere between gangster opera and the kind of po-faced self-importance that scuttled films like Michael Fassbender’s The Snowman or Jupiter Ascending with Channing Tatum. The Godfather this is not.
Obviously, Steven Knight knows he isn’t Scorsese—I doubt he wants to be. That’s why the grenade-down-the-shirt set piece, and the pigsty scrap scene, work so hard to lighten the load. They’re a pomposity prophylactic. A pressure valve to give us a laugh—God knows, we’ve waited long enough.
This film does, lest we forget, carry a lot of baggage. Six seasons of television mythology is a lot to take on—no wonder Murphy seemed so reluctant to reprise the role back when season six ended (though, fair play: he’s done a good job convincing us otherwise on the Immortal Man publicity tour).
Tommy Shelby is less of a character now, but a monument—and monuments, as a rule, don’t crumble very naturally. You have to smash them down.
Personally, I would have liked more of it—more mud, more blood, more booze. And more laughs. More reasons to punch the air for Tommy. More depth to the new characters (especially Kaulo the mystic). More soul!
Then again, just like Tommy, this film is here to do its own last job—to clear the decks for a new generation of Shelbys. Murphy has his Oscar now, and obviously doesn’t want his career defined by Tommy Shelby. The Immortal Man doesn't feel like a fully fledged feature—it’s a bridge, a glorified episode—but it does its job. It reminds us why we loved Tommy in the first place: the mud, the blood, the booze, and, yes, the family stakes that drag a man back into the fight he thought he’d left behind.
Just, if it had to be a bridge, I wish it had been a little more Golden Gate, and a little less rickety rope.
Peaky Binders: The Immortal Man is streaming now on Netflix.
