Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (Tom Harper, 2026)

The recipe for the big screen transfer of a TV show was set in the 1970s: send the characters on a package holiday. Steven Knight hasn’t learned this lesson, so we don’t get Tommy Shelby in Spain.

That Civil War would have been perfect, with Shelby mistaken for a Francoist…

I was late to the TV series – I might have bounced off the first episode – but it found its feet even if the final season was below par. There comes a point when you wonder why Tommy Shelby hasn’t been shot and how many guest stars wan to be the season villain. Eventually it noticed that the cast was hideously male – but the death of Helen McCrory robbed them of a key counterbalancing character.

It’s been a while, so I’ve lost track of whose dead, but at the start of the film Shelby (Cilian Murphy) has retired to his country pile to write his memoirs and semi-acknowledged son Duke (Barry Keoghan) has taken over the Blinders and probably should be stopped.

(I still have high hopes for Keoghan – post Saltburn and The Killing of a Sacred Deer – but, like Adam Driver, I’m never quite convinced. I hope Crime 101 subsidised better choices.)

The stopping is going to get in the way of a Nazi plan to flood Britain with fake fivers (none of which feature Winston Churchill, a dead giveaway), which Beckett (Tim Roth) is masterminding. Beckett is happy to off anyone who threatens the plan.

All the Peaky Blinders have to do is travel overnight from Birmingham to Liverpool by barge and … well, whatever.

There are nods to the TV series – Shelby on a horse to tell us yes they know this is a Western really, Shelby putting a coat on, interaction in the Garrison Bar. But it all feels a little uncinematic compared to the telly (and I watched the series on a tablet) and the story curiously thin. It’s a winter’s tale, on a single note and to much feels like it was shot against green screen.

In a voiceover at the start, Murphy tells us not to give the ending away, lest it ruins it for Netflix viewers. If they really cared, they’d be in the cinema. But I’d better not say that we get the only ending the plot could allow.