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’s 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 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.
As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham 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’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)
