'Luther: The Fallen Sun' review: Idris Elba escapes prison but can't escape corny storyline in feature spin-off

"Luther: The Fallen Sun" begins by punishing its protagonist – a scruffy, transgressive detective The Inspector Chief John Luther (Idris Elba) - for all his past sins after the franchise's newest villain, played by Andy Serkis, leaked details of Luther's rule-bending tactics to the media. On the phone with some sort of Estonian henchman, Robey de Serkis implies that it will be difficult to dig up dirt on Luther because "he doesn't have a lot of online presence", but the next thing we know , Luther is thrown into a high-security prison. Guess they got their hands on the last five seasons of the BBC TV series.

Or maybe the last episode was enough - although we're not retroactively disclosing that here, for those who have not spent the last twelve years following the exploits of Luther. Suffice it to say, it was the role that got people speculating that Elba might make a suitable replacement when Daniel Craig decided to revoke his license to kill. Like Craig's 21st century 007, Luther was a darker, more tortured action hero, torn between a constipated psychology and his locomotive driving to capture and punish wrongdoers.

Directed by Jamie Payne (who directed most of Season 5), this standalone feature picks up where the series left off (although the circumstances of Luther's arrest are different) and does not require the audience to have seen what happened before. Netflix will even release "The Fallen Sun" in theaters for the first time on February 24, which is both optimistic and bizarre, given how few theaters play into the streamer's strategy. Chances are most are expecting it to be available through their subscriptions on March 10th - and even then the film is more for Luther finalists than just the curious.

The budget seems extravagant, allowing for elaborate helicopter/drone shots (including one of Luther heroically standing atop a London skyscraper, her wool coat billowing like a bat cape in the wind) and a finale shot all the way to Iceland (doubling for Norway), where Robey maintains a base worthy of a Bond villain. The film opens with the misinterpreted killer (at this point, just a threatening voice) blackmailing a young janitor into meeting him. Then the scene takes a strange turn; one never knows why Robey doesn't just kidnap him, rather than over-complicate the kidnapping and leave another corpse behind. But it all boils down to a rather cheesy serial killer flick starring Luther as a cop on his trail, himself being chased by brilliant DCI replacement Odette Raine (Cynthia Erivo). For some reason, this all reminded me of "The Snowman". And you never want to be reminded of "The Snowman".

Perhaps what makes "The Fallen Sun" so hard to take seriously is the choice weird of Serkis playing some sort of insidious cyber mastermind. The typically versatile actor (best known for performance-capturing roles like Gollum and King Kong) is all smiles under an elaborately dried wig, worn like your Aunt Mildred styled her hair in the 80s. He's a ridiculous character, based on no-one who's never lived, able to hack laptop cameras or listen through Alexa devices and unsuspecting people's baby monitors (sounds plausible).

Robey may or may not be assisted by a small army of surveillance snoopers to list all the sins of people random: drugs, gambling, pornography, fraud (it's much harder to say, as suggested by an absurd montage in which shady numbers identify random tech users as "possible targets"). The creep then uses these peccadilloes to blackmail seemingly good people into all sorts of weird behaviors - like convincing a guilty cop to undermine the investigation, and when the cops close in, even to commit murder in his name.

Now here's the even weirder thing: Luther has some kind of weird intuition about criminals who allows him to figure it all out without even a single old-fashioned clue. At a time when “people live their secret lives on the internet,” as the Luddite sleuth puts it, Luther thinks Robey has “probably figured out that under the right circumstances…fear of being called…is far more powerful than fear. of death. "It's a com...