There is a moment in the movie when a soldier, newly confronted with the legend of Thomas Shelby says,'Who the fuck is Tommy Shelby?' It's played for laughs. And yet, Tommy is not smiling.
After six seasons and thirteen years, he's clearly not just a character. He is a legend, torn and crumbling within himself, waiting for his downfall only to rise up. Will he be a martyr? Or will he go down as the nutcase who couldn’t sustain his power? The movie looks into this.
Set in 1940, the film finds Tommy in unglamorous business of self-erasure, sequestered in a crumbling country manor, writing his memoirs, haunted by his daughter’s memories, shooting pigeons and doing a convincing impression of a man who has given up
The father-son axis is where the film earns everything. Their reunion in a pigsty: Tommy tracking Duke down, two of them brawling in mud, swinging and staggering like men who don’t know any other language for love, is the best scene in the film.
The film is at its weakest when it leans into the ceremonial. slow-motion callbacks, portentous voiceover, the visual grammar of myth-making. Steve Knight’s screenplay is not unaware of this trap, but it doesn’t always avoid it
For those who have followed Tommy Shelby across a decade and a half of television: the grief, the schemes, the flat cap, the horse, it is, against reasonable odds, enough. He deserved to go out like this. On his own terms, mid-sentence, remembered.