The Peaky Blinders TV series ended back in 2022, but rumors of a new season have been circling around for a few years. Once Cillian Murphy won the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer, Netflix quickly greenlit a new film that will close out the story of the Peaky Blinders permanently.

When the TV series ended, WWII was about to start, and it is now 1940, and WWII is in full force. Nazi-occupied Germany is trying to economically subdue the United Kingdom by utilizing copious amounts of counterfeit British currency manufactured by the inmates of the regime’s concentration camps. The goal is to trigger hyperinflation and make the UK powerless.

Tommy Shelby (Murphy) lives in isolation, having retreated from public life after the death of his elder brother Arthur, who supposedly committed suicide a few years earlier. Still mourning the death of the two people he loved the most, his first wife and his daughter with his second wife. His only companion is royal henchman Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee).

One day, his sister Ada Shelby (Sophie Rundle), who has succeeded Tommy as the MP for Birmingham South, visits him to inform him of the acts committed by the Peaky Blinders, now led by his son Duke Shelby (Barry Keoghan). Duke has joined forces with a Nazi agent, John Beckett (Tim Roth), who intends to have the Peaky Blinders distribute £350 million of counterfeit currency inside Britain through the gang’s networks. Beckett also orders Duke to assassinate anyone who is trying to stop the Nazis from taking power in the UK.

Ada is asking Tommy to go and stop his son from working with the Nazi agent. But Tommy has no desire to go back to his old life of violence and corruption. Later, a mysterious woman named Kaulo Chiriklo (Rebecca Ferguson), the twin sister of Zelda Chiriklo, with whom Tommy had conceived Duke in 1914. Tommy is a Gypsy and believes in the supernatural. Kaulo claims to have spoken to Arthur from beyond the grave and goads Tommy into divulging that he had accidentally killed Arthur. Tommy also can’t resist Kaulo’s charms because she looks exactly like the person he had fallen in love with. When someone close to Tommy was killed by Beckett, he had no choice but to get back into his old self and take revenge and maybe save his son, too.

I recently finished watching the entire TV series, and I was excited to see this movie because the series’s last episode left me feeling unfulfilled. I expected to see something more epic to close out the saga. Sadly, there’s not much going on in this movie.

Directed by Tom Harper and written by Steven Knight, this was a simple revenge story, and it did close out the story. But I feel like so many things were left out of the story; this film needs to be longer. I don’t know if they decided to trim it down or if it was written this way.

While fans of the TV series will know about the returning character’s background, we don’t know much about the new characters, like Beckett, Kaulo, and Duke. The actors were fine, but they didn’t have much to do, especially Tim Roth. I wonder if many of his scenes were edited out during post-production. Murphy is great as always, since he has played Tommy for several years.

While the movie isn’t as epic as I was hoping for, it was still entertaining, and they finally put an end to Tommy’s journey. This is very similar to El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which brings closure to a once-great TV show.

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