3/10

There’s disappointing television, and then there’s whatever that Peaky Blinders film thought it was doing.

For years, Peaky Blinders built one of the most magnetic anti-heroes modern British television has produced. Tommy Shelby was cold, strategic, and emotionally fractured, yes, but always dangerous. Even in grief, even in addiction, even when the world was collapsing around him, the man had presence. Steel. Calculation. A sense that every room bent slightly in his direction.

The film strips all of that away and leaves behind a confused ghost wandering through bad dialogue and scenes stitched together like rejected monologues from a GCSE drama class.

And the dialogue. Sweet suffering Jesus.

Characters no longer speak like people shaped by war, poverty, ambition and violence. They speak like screenwriters desperately trying to recreate “iconic Peaky Blinders quotes” for TikTok edits. Every second line sounds engineered for a black-and-white Instagram graphic beside a whiskey tumbler.

The original series understood restraint. Silence and nuance. Threats landed because they were rarely over-explained. Tommy Shelby could destroy someone with half a sentence and a cigarette pause. Here, everyone talks endlessly and says absolutely nothing.

Worse still is what they did to Tommy himself.

Instead of a complicated man wrestling with trauma while still commanding fear and respect, he’s reduced to a fumbling, sentimental ruin. Not tragic in the Shakespearean sense. Just oddly diminished. Passive. Drained of the terrifying intelligence that made the character compelling in the first place.

Aging a character is one thing. Breaking him down emotionally can work brilliantly. But this felt less like evolution and more like betrayal. As if the writers fundamentally misunderstood why audiences connected to him at all.

Tommy Shelby was never admired because he was “good”. He was admired because he survived. Because he adapted and beneath the trauma was a mind constantly moving three steps ahead. The film replaces that with vague brooding and repetitive emotional collapse. Don’t even get us started on how they killed off the sister, the only decent character with potential in the entire film.

It mistakes exhaustion for depth.

The pacing lurches about like a pub fight at closing time. Characters appear with little weight. Stakes never properly settle. Scenes that should devastate emotionally somehow drift by without impact. Even visually, the film lacks the grime and mythic atmosphere that once made Birmingham feel almost haunted.

And perhaps that’s the real issue. The original series carried mythology. This feels like content.

A franchise extension. A nostalgia harvest. Another example of television executives refusing to let a successful story die with dignity.

Not every cultural phenomenon needs resurrection. Sometimes the smartest thing a story can do is end before it starts embalming itself.

Instead, Peaky Blinders the film turns one of television’s great modern characters into a shell of himself and expects audiences to applaud simply because the haircut and soundtrack remain intact.

Utterly disappointing drivel.