Four years after the television saga signed off, the film spin-off of Peaky Blinders returns to find Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby haunting the ruins of 1940 Birmingham, ugly computer-generated German bombs obligingly exploding in the margins.
An overture featuring the deaths of dozens of female factory workers establishes the project’s thunderous intent and negligible feeling. For all the smoke and masonry, remarkably little seems at stake beyond the dead-horse-flogging preservation of the brand.
Murphy retains his screen heft as Shelby, now a hermit dragged from self-imposed exile for one last tussle over family and country. The actor remains a magnetic presence – a standoff with a brash young soldier in a pub re-establishes the menace behind his icy stare – but the script gives him little beyond recycled trauma, cod-Shakespearean voiceover and portentous murmuring.
Romantic flashbacks, political conspiracies and mumbled destinies pile up like the undetonated shells they are. A hooded leather coat and many cemetery strolls make one think of a Tesco Value Batman.
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The plot, such as it is, gestures towards a generational showdown. Duke Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan with feral charisma, must choose between blood ties and the notoriety offered by Tim Roth’s Nazi conspirator: “End the war with banknotes, not bombs.”
Keoghan, promising that he doesn’t give a fig about anything, least of all Hitler’s advances, provides a volatility the film sorely needs.
Even his performance gets lost in a quagmire of magical thinking, gypsy curses, retconning, recasting and, in one especially preposterous soapy flourish, a dead character resurrected as her dead sister.
By the time Stephen Graham arrives to lend gravitas to the harried denouement, the enterprise has tipped into self-parody. Slow-motion struts, thudding anthems and swooningly framed caps evoke a Fontaines DC music video rather than a big-screen reckoning. A cover of the Massive Attack track Angel by Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC, and his collaboration with Lankum on Hunting the Wren, are fine tunes squandered on sound and fury.
What once felt coolly stylised now seems mannered, even silly. The cufflinks gleam from the heritage cosplay: the razor has dulled.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in cinemas from Friday, March 6th, and on Netflix from Friday, March 20th
