THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING (PEAKY BLINDERS, SERIES THREE)

After two series of battling Sam Neill's twisted Chief Inspector Campbell, Series Three finds the Peaky Blinders with much bigger fish to fry.

After encountering Winston Churchill and being spared a bullet in the back of the head from the Ulster Volunteer Force, Cillian Murphy's Tommy Shelby begins his third adventure in a state of marital bliss.

He marries the love of his life, Anabelle Wallis' Grace Burgess but not even a wedding can take place without Birmingham's infamous cloth capped gang spilling some blood.

This time it's Paul Anderson's Arthur who does the nasty deed, killing a Russian who appears to have infiltrated the wedding and made the mistake of giving the gang the wrong password.

Jan Bijvoet's Archduke Romansov, a refugee from the Russian Revolution, is impressed and gifts Tommy a sapphire for killing the man.

The Archduke also strikes a business deal with Tommy, introducing him to Gaite Jansen's Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna.

Lurking in the background, though, is Paddy Considine's sinister Father John Hughes who plays a part in striking the deal.

He is so virulently anti-Communist he threatens to have Tommy's son Charlie killed if his left wing activist sister Sophie Rundle's Ada gets wind of their business venture.

(SPOLIER ALERT!!)

During a Shelby Foundation charity dinner, Grace wears the sapphire given to her husband and is accidentally shot dead when the London-based Sicilian Changretta family sends an assassin to kill Tommy.

The assassination has been ordered by Kenneth Colley's Vincente Changretta who is furious that Joe Cole's John Shelby beat up his son Angel, with the approval of Tommy.

While disturbed by Grace's death, Tommy nevertheless plunges into a tempestuous affair with Countess Petrovna.

Vincente Changretta is also abducted, tortured and killed by the Peaky Blinders in revenge for Grace's murder.

When it becomes clearer that Fr Hughes is playing a shrewd but dangerous game with the Russians, Tommy soon finds his life endangered.

And if that wasn't enough, he also has to contend with Helen McCrory's Polly's fling with an artist and her fervent desire to keep her son, Finn Cole's Michael Gray away from the path of violence.

Ada also returns to the family business and there's the matter of reconciling Arthur and his Quaker wife, Kate Phillips' Linda's deeply held religious beliefs with the family's unsavoury line of business.

Directed by Tim Mielants from six scripts by 'Peaky Blinders' creator Steven Knight, Series Three is a typically stylish affair with a great soundtrack.

This time the music is provided by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Queens of the Stone Age, The Last Shadow Puppets, David Bowie, The Kills and Leonard Cohen.

However in an attempt to go beyond the narrow tale of a determined but vicious policeman trying to stymie the growth of a Birmingham organised crime empire, Knight ends up with a muddled plot involving Russians, a dodgy priest, a cursed Sapphire, a jewel heist that necessitates the return of Tom Hardy's Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons, the Economic League and a vendetta with an Italian gang.

The writing in Series Three just cannot match the scale of Knight's ambition.

And nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the rather unconvincing character of Father Hughes, who is essentially a smart thug in a Catholic priest's collar and cassock.

The notion of a priest wading into the murky world of espionage and playing all sides is too hard to swallow.

No matter how hard Paddy Considine tries, even an actor of his calibre just can't pull such a far fetched role off.

With too many loosely connected strands, the narrative struggles under their collective weight and the cast does too.

Grace's passing, while initially shocking, soon loses its impact as Tommy moves on to a new romantic conquest.

Arthur's conversion into a Jesus freak sits jarringly with being a Peaky Blinder and all that entails.

Polly seems a little off pace top as she engages in a romance with Alexander Siddig's artist Reuben Oliver that somehow doesn't quite fire on all cylinders.

No-one can say Murphy, Anderson and McCrory don't give their all but all that effort cannot compensate for Knight's lack of focus.

The same is true for Wallis, Joe and Finn Cole, Rundle, Jansen, Bijvoet and Colley and series regulars like Packy Lee, Benjamin Zepeniah and Ned Dennehy who struggle manfully with scripts that at times stretch credulity.

Indeed, the only bright spark of the series is Hardy who continues to amuse as the intimidating Alfie Solomons just as he did in the second.

Series three of 'Peaky Blinders' really feels like a missed opportunity to build on the promise of the first two series.

Its plot is simply too convoluted and is lacking in focus.

Knight's failure to achieve narrative coherence is a major blot on the record of a series that could have rivalled the great HBO and AMC dramas of recent decades.

Can he get it back on track for Series Four?

(Series three of 'Peaky Blinders' aired on BBC2 from May 5-June 9, 2016)