Immortal Man: They Killed Peaky Blinders to Make Peaky Blinders
There’s a particular kind of betrayal that only beloved franchises can pull off. It’s not the betrayal of a bad sequel, which at least has the decency to feel like an accident. This is something more premeditated—the kind where everyone involved clearly watched the original, absorbed its surfaces, and then systematically hollowed out everything underneath. Immortal Man does not fail despite its ambitions. It fails through them. Congratulations are almost in order.
Let’s begin with the premise, which arrives dressed in mysticism and never quite takes off its coat. The film positions Rebecca Ferguson’s character as a near-prophetic force at the center of the story—a figure of weight, consequence, and obscure spiritual gravity. It’s a compelling idea, written on paper, by someone who then apparently lost the paper. On screen, Ferguson’s character doesn’t maneuver. She doesn’t scheme. She doesn’t accumulate influence through the kind of cold, transactional intelligence that Thomas Shelby once turned into an art form. She simply is important, and the script—bless its credulous little heart—expects the audience to keep up. This is not characterization. This is a Post-it note where a character used to be.
The superstition angle compounds this. Peaky Blinders always flirted with folklore—Tommy’s visions, the gypsy curse, the weight of the dead hovering at the edge of every scene. But that mysticism worked because it was psychological, not mechanical. It colored the internal lives of people navigating real external violence. In Immortal Man, prophecy doesn’t color the plot—it replaces it. Logic is optional. Cause and effect are quaint. Why did that happen? Because it was foreshadowed. By whom? By Ferguson, standing in a doorway, looking meaningful. What does it mean? That is not a question the film has budgeted time for.
The casualties pile up quickly. Duke, who emerged from Season 6 as one of the more quietly exciting prospects in the Shelby orbit—measured, watchful, the kind of person who calculates twice before speaking once—arrives in Immortal Man lobotomized. He makes deals without hesitation. He takes people at their word. He operates with the street wisdom of someone who has recently and forcefully hit their head. This is not a character arc. This is a character being pushed off a cliff while the screenplay whistles innocently. The original series understood that intelligence was survival. Duke apparently missed the memo, which, in fairness, nobody gave him, because the script forgot to write it.
And then there is the villain.
Tim Toth’s antagonist is the film’s most spectacular miscalculation, which is saying something in a film that is essentially a themed collection of miscalculations. He is not menacing. He is not calculating. He is not the kind of person you can imagine outmaneuvering a customs officer, let alone Thomas Shelby. He declares. He postures. He behaves, in every scene, like a man who has been told that villains are threatening and has decided to demonstrate this by being very loud about his intentions. Subtlety is not his instrument. Strategy is not his instrument. His instrument appears to be volume.
This is catastrophic for a franchise built entirely on the proposition that power is earned. Every great Peaky Blinders antagonist—Luca Changretta, Oswald Mosley, even the looming institutional menace of Inspector Campbell—was dangerous because they were smart. Because you could watch them think. Because when they clashed with Shelby, it felt like two systems of intelligence colliding, and you genuinely weren’t sure which one would survive the impact. Here, there is no collision. There’s just Toth, telegraphing, and Shelby, reacting, and an audience slowly realizing that nobody in this narrative is actually playing chess.
Cillian Murphy, to his immense credit, refuses to embarrass himself. His Shelby is still precise, still coiled, still doing that thing where he appears to be completely still while somehow radiating the impression of enormous internal velocity. But you can sense the effort. He is, to use a technical term, acting against the gravity of the screenplay—trying to generate weight in scenes that are structurally weightless, trying to imply consequence in a story that has quietly abolished it. He almost pulls it off. The film, unkindly, does not return the favor.
What remains is a film that has mastered the appearance of Peaky Blinders while fundamentally misunderstanding what Peaky Blinders was. The smoke is here. The slow walks are here. The amber light catching the rim of a glass is here, doing its level best. The aesthetics have been reproduced with care, the way you might carefully reconstruct the facade of a building after gutting everything behind it. It looks like the thing. It does not work like the thing. And the difference between looking and working is, in the end, the entire point.
Peaky Blinders was a show about intelligence operating under pressure. About people who survived by being smarter, faster, and more ruthless in their thinking than everyone around them. Immortal Man is a film about people reacting to a plot that has already made up its mind. The Shelby family didn’t deserve a requiem. They deserved a worthy opponent.
They got a mood board instead.