Luther’s creator,Neil Cross,has been toying with the desire to do a Luther feature since 2021. At that stage,he wanted to make it a prequel so he could bring back Ruth Wilson’s Alice Morgan,a killer whose obsessive attachment to Detective Chief Inspector Luther accounted for much of the psychological complexity powering the plots.
But time went on,and he finally settled on a sequel. Luther is pursuing a serial killer,which is nothing new. Cross has never held back when it comes to a touch of the gruesome and here,he excels himself. Andy Serkis plays the villain. With a grey bouffant and a creepy air of self-satisfaction,he is cast as David Robey,a cyber tycoon with a side interest in blackmail and murder,the more ingeniously sadistic the better. What’s more,he telegraphs his every move in the jolly tones of someone planning the office Christmas party.
Naturally,Luther proves more than a match for him,but it takes him a while to get down to business. Following a string of offences that are never fully explained,he is sacked from the police force and sentenced to serve time in prison. As we know he will,he eventually manages to engineer his escape,but he has to fight half the prison population to do it. It’s a tribute to Elba’s command of the screen that I could just about go along with this wildly implausible train of events. You’re left in no doubt he would make a great Bond.
And it’s not the only implausibility. There are gaping holes in the narrative,but Cross and the director,Jamie Payne,who worked on the series,operate on the assumption logic can be glossed over if you put enough effort into mood and atmosphere. Robey is their chief accomplice in this. Fancying himself a master in the art of the macabre,he stages his crimes with great attention to lighting and decor. There are derelict mansions,underground tunnels and carefully arranged dead bodies – lots of them.
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Luther teams up with a fellow DCI,Odette Raine (Cynthia Erivo),after he succeeds in persuading her that he’s not a crooked cop,and his old mentor and friend Detective Superintendent Schenk (Dermot Crowley) comes out of retirement to give advice.