Neil Cross’s smash-hit BBC TV crime drama now gets its own standalone feature film, with Idris Elba returning as the troubled London police officer John Luther, effectively continuing the story from the end of the fifth season. This may well play very effectively to the show’s fanbase and there’s certainly an alpha supporting cast including Cynthia Erivo, Andy Serkis and Hattie Morahan.
But I have to say – and those squeamish about spoilers and cliches had better look away now – that without the extended context of longform TV, the greater emphasis on explicit, violent horror is a bit exhausting. The serial-killer accessories feel hand-me-down; the Scandi noir touch is spurious and storylines in the movies about evil criminal plans to livestream snuff-porn are frankly always lame and implausible. At the dawn of the internet age, the snuff-internet-porn-themed film actually became its own yucky and naive subgenre, with movies such as Marc Evans’s My Little Eye and Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover, and it doesn’t deserve a comeback now.
At all events, Elba brings his mighty physical presence to Luther, the London copper with some baggage concerning the corners he’s cut and his all-round maverickness (although of course there’s never a moment when we genuinely think he’s anything other than a good guy). When a young kid is kidnapped, Luther makes a promise to distraught mum Corinne (Morahan) to get him back – so the villain, with his evil hair in his evil lair, mobilises his network of highly placed individuals on whom he has blackmail information to get Luther arrested and banged up for his nobly intended misdeeds.
Luther then gets himself sprung from the nick (via a jailhouse rock punch-up) and sets out to track the bad guy down, clashing as he does so with his former superior officer, DSU Martin Schenk (Dermot Rowley) and Schenk’s successor, DSU Odette Raine (Erivo). The insidiously gurning bad guy is played by Serkis, who certainly gives it some welly. It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.
• Luther: The Fallen Sun is released on 24 February in cinemas and on 10 March on Netflix.
