Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023)

March 12, 2023 12:42 PM

Brilliant but disgraced detective John Luther breaks out of prison to hunt down a sadistic serial killer who is terrorising London.
posted by kittens for breakfast (9 comments total)

I enjoyed this a lot, but I wouldn't suggest it to people who haven't seen the show. From what I can tell, this is just a long episode of Luther with a little more money and a cool guest star. Like a lot of British shows, Luther was on for like ten years and ran around a dozen episodes, so you can probably watch the whole thing in a week.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:45 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Liked it but I think the show did it better, it was a bit too grand, the end was very  « Bondian » with the remote impractical lair, and they topped it with the MI5 offer, I half expected to see Ralph Fienne in that car.

Couldn’t have been happier when they played paradise circus though, so associated with this show to me.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 1:24 PM on March 12, 2023

Was Alice in this?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:32 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

this was maybe the worst luther outing yet, with an absolutely absurd performance by andy serkis as an utterly implausible mass murderer with the strangest hairstyles i’ve ever seen outside of the fifth element. really he has an army of people who will cooperate in killing dozens of others because he caught them jerking off to fetish porn or whatever? not a single one he blackmailed who decided to call the cops? it makes sense on a small scale, but there were enough people involved in this scheme to staff a tescos. also how the hell did they get from london to estonia that fast. were they wearing diapers? but mostly it had nothing or very little of the dark glimpses into luthers soul, the moments where he seems just as empty and cold inside as the killers he hunts. i was a huge fan on the series which is also idris elbas best work but only forced myself to finish this one since i had nothing better to do while folding laundry.
posted by dis_integration at 7:55 PM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

also, no alice, sadly. the people demand more ruth wilson but they do not always get what they want
posted by dis_integration at 8:00 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

During the episodic shows I had always seen Luther's ability to put himself into the mindset of the killer and yet toe a personal code of morality to be the character's biggest appeal. It made his bad-apple-cop antics just about palatable because we also saw the huge toll those behaviors took on him and the few relationships tethering him to the right side of protecting the innocent. Alice Morgan was his dark reflection.

But in this... I mean. The villain takes umbrage at Luther being assigned the case of the missing guy/found woman he himself had no discernable reason to instigate (seriously, was this supposed to generate free publicity for the Red Room or had he just maxed out on his missing bodies storage unit?).

And does Luther out-think the villain? Does he apply psychology or some sort of devastating understanding of the human mind? Or does he purely react to all the villainous taunting the villain has no plausible reason to do other than for self-destructive purposes?

That the big break in the case comes from a simple cherchez-la-femme and the denouement is to diagnose anxiety and then apply judicious amounts of running and punching... Well, this was sub-par Luther.
posted by Molesome at 4:55 AM on March 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I like Luther. I think it has often tap-danced on the edge of ridiculousness. I think Fallen Sun falls off that edge into a frozen pool to be rescued by people abseiling out of helicopters as he somehow works the touchscreen of a phone underwater. I don't think I have ever said "this is stupid" more often in a film. Whether it's Andy Serkis's wig, his new-found invulnerability to hypothermia as he wanders around Norway in wet clothes, to the nod and wink to the Idris Elba Bond rumours at the end, this is a deeply silly film, and the silliness ruins the normal Luther-ness of things. There were a few good scenes, but otherwise it was just gesturing towards cliches, and none of it really made much sense, or had much point.

Oh, and season 5 did the "killer in an LED mask" much better.
posted by Hartster at 7:11 AM on March 13, 2023

I think Neil Cross must have felt he had to level up the show to make it A Movie. (Either that, or Netflix did.) The premise, to me, is a sound one -- a network of people being e-blackmailed into doing nefarious deeds worked on Black Mirror! -- but it's scaled up to a point where it's bordering on Batman villain shit. That said, Luther (the series) has generally been kind of ridiculous if you think about it for more than a few seconds; John is constantly fighting serial killers, which occur in nature...um...much less frequently than once a week, even in a major city. Beyond about the second episode, I found that it was crucial to my enjoyment of the show to read it as pure escapist fiction. I do concur, though, that Andy Serkis' wig is some kind of crime against humanity, or at least against Andy Serkis, who I'm sure is a nice person in real life and did not deserve to be done so dirty.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:30 AM on March 13, 2023

Luther has always been much more absurd than I've wanted it to be, and this was pretty bad. The core of the show is good.

The scuba divers — the whole scene, really, but the divers caught my eye — was so contrived. I thought of possible jokes here in FanFare about all the random people who showed up for the copter flight. I think I saw a trauma counselor, a locksmith, a demolition team, and a St. Bernard with a keg of brandy get off that copter.

There were a couple of good things in this. First was the scene where the cop has to reconcile herself to the impossible situation she's in and decides to cooperate with Luther. The other was how we knew that Luther's old boss knew that the one detective was dirty. It was nicely understated. Is he noticing how squirrelly the guy is acting? In most shows, the corrupt cop is lampshaded so strongly that everybody else in the scene should have noticed. But did old boss notice? Yep; we learned a long time ago that he's sharper than he seems.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:48 AM on March 14, 2023