Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGK5qtXuc1Q I approached Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023) not as a sequel to a BBC show that I haven’t seen, but as Idris Elba’s Netflix vehicle, and as such, it left me utterly underwhelmed. Full disclosure: I am an Idris Elba fan. He does the very British “less is more” acting method to perfection: in Prometheus (2012), his character has only a few lines and still manages to outshine the rest of the all-star ensemble. Elba is at his maximum star wattage when he exudes class (Obsessed, 2009) or kinetic energy (Beasts of No Nation, 2015). Alas, he is none of that in Luther: The Fallen Sun. Instead, we get a morose, mumbling Elba. As if, after playing the London police inspector for five seasons (2010-2019) on British television, he decided to phone this one in. Netflix’s John Luther is a push-over. We watch him being bossed around by a mother of a victim, inmates in jail, colleagues in the police, and David Robey (Andy Serkis), a hyperactive serial killer who desperately tries to elevate death-porn Zoom sessions into a cult. In their final confrontation, in a car sinking to the bottom of a frozen lake, Luther is more interested in wrestling away the remote control from Robey than finishing him off. Viewers flocked to Netflix to see Elba kick ass in style, like the first black James Bond would. The 65 million hours of the movie viewed worldwide put the show at #1 on the streamer’s Top 10 ("Variety"). But what slow-footed, slow-witted Luther really achieved, is to effectively bury the dream of Elba ever donning the famous tux and introducing himself to a Belarussian honeytrap as “Bond, James Bond.” The plot is confusing, and cliches keep piling up, eventually reaching the level of absurdity unexpected from an Idris-Elba-caliber production. Luther gets thrown into a prison that is populated almost exclusively by white bigots who hate Luther’s guts. Because he is a cop. They knock him unconscious in a shower. Later, during a prison revolt, they are hell-bent on breaking into Luther’s cell and killing him. Why didn’t they do it in the shower, or when they saw him in the canteen and prison yard?! Set design and editing don’t help. After the gratuitous nudity/jail shower scene, John Luther throws on an inconspicuous hoodie and goes to some urban dump to meet two pals under the rain. He asks them to break him out of jail. By the looks of it, he is already out, but according to Luther, he is still inside. At this point, I am too busy trying to decipher the motivations behind this production to care about Luther’s whereabouts. Neil Cross, the show’s creator, doesn’t seem to know what to make out of the Netflix sequel: a pulp-noir comedy in the vein of Dick Tracy