Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has left some fans feeling “betrayed”, and there’s one argument that keeps coming up: the story might have worked far better as a full series instead of a film.
The original ending of Peaky Blinders felt like a natural conclusion, but creator Steven Knight always saw more story to tell.
Now, four years later, The Immortal Man picks things back up with Tommy Shelby returning to Birmingham during the Second World War. He faces off against his son Duke, now leading the Peaky Blinders, while trying to stop a Nazi plot.
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But while some characters return, others are missing entirely. For many viewers, that’s just one of several issues with how the story has been told.
***Warning: spoilers for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ahead***
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man shouldn’t have been a movie
At just under two hours, the film packs in a lot of major developments:
- A Nazi sympathiser recruits Duke to help flood the UK with counterfeit money
- Ada is killed
- Tommy returns from exile to Birmingham
- It’s revealed Arthur is dead, and that Tommy killed him
- Duke switches sides and helps Tommy
- The Nazi ally is defeated
- Tommy dies, with Duke carrying out a mercy killing
There are also some glaring absences. Finn Shelby, who vowed revenge on Duke, isn’t seen or even mentioned. Oswald Mosley, a major antagonist in the series, doesn’t appear despite the wartime setting. Alfie is also missing.
Taken together, it raises a bigger question. Should this have been a film at all?
Spreading the story across multiple episodes would have given its biggest twists and emotional moments more space to land. Instead, key developments arrive quickly and move on just as fast.
Even Tommy’s return feels rushed. At the end of series 6, it seemed like the world believed he was dead. Yet in the film, people already know where he is, and he quickly reconnects with allies like Johnny Dogs.
Peaky Blinders ‘deserved another series’
For many fans, the core issue isn’t the story itself, but how quickly everything unfolds.
“The series deserved either another season or a three hour movie. It seemed very, very, very rushed, and honestly just underwhelming. The ideas were not bad at all, but as I said, very rushed,” one user wrote on Reddit.
“The premise of the film was by no means bad but would have been better as another series imo. Six episodes, with the final episode drawing the show to it’s conclusion would have given them more opportunity to showcase the storylines and characters leading up to the last scene,” another said.
“It should have been season 7,” a third added. “If it would have been a season 7, and the things that happened in the movie would have been more deeply developed, then the plot of this movie would have been amazing,” another argued.
“I think the plot would have been fine had everything had chance to breathe, but as a movie I don’t think it worked at all, it all just went by as a blur moving from one thing to another,” another wrote.
Read more: Every Peaky Blinders actor who’s died, from Helen McCrory to Benjamin Zephaniah
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is on Netflix now.
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