Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has arrived on Netflix with impressive audience numbers and a curious critical split that perfectly encapsulates the ongoing struggle of transitioning beloved television shows to the big screen.
The film, which reunites Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby for a World War II-set continuation of the series, boasts a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes - suggesting critics largely enjoyed it. But that Metacritic score of 59 tells a different story: one of qualified praise, of critics acknowledging the film works for fans while questioning whether it justifies its existence.
That gap between aggregated "fresh/rotten" scores and weighted critical assessment is revealing. It suggests a movie that delivers what fans want - more Tommy Shelby scheming in period costume - without transcending its television origins or making a compelling case for why this story needed to be told as a film rather than another season.
We've seen this pattern before. Downton Abbey made a pile of money while critics shrugged. Sex and the City (the first one, we don't talk about the second) satisfied fans but left critics cold. Even The X-Files revival films struggled to justify their feature-length format.
The TV-to-film transition works when there's a clear reason for the switch - Breaking Bad's El Camino told a story that made sense as a standalone epilogue. It fails when it's just "more of the same but longer and with a bigger budget."
The Immortal Man seems to fall somewhere in between. Murphy remains magnetic as Shelby, and director Tom Harper understands the show's visual language. The cast additions - Rebecca Ferguson, Barry Keoghan, - bring gravitas. But from critic consensus, it sounds like a very good episode of television stretched to film length, not a fully realized cinematic experience.
