Mel Gibson's LA Detective Martin Riggs has done it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it just before fighting off the apocalypse in End of Days. And now Idris Elba does it, putting a single bullet (kept, bizarrely, in the microwave) in a pistol, spinning the chamber, and putting it next to his temple over breakfast. Unsurprisingly, this being the opening sequence of the first episode of four in a new run of BBC One's crime drama Luther, the gun clicks empty. At which point DCI John Luther puts it down, finishes up his half drunk cup of coffee, and sets off to work.
I've no doubt this is something many public servants do on a Monday morning, but in the hands of this singularly improbable cop show it comes off precisely as an affect learned from The Big Book of Genre Conventions, rather than anything in the territory of a compelling character trait. In this way it is indicative, as Luther shows nothing in the way of originality, wit or style. For some reason, though, its creators care about the characters involved, even as they abuse them, undermine them, and pour them awkwardly into different moulds on a weekly basis to fit another generic template. This equivocal commitment is one of the things makes Luther so strangely addictive (you can read my piece on the pilot here, and the ridiculous final episode of the first season here).
The more things change the more they stay the same: DCI Teller is gone (hopefully back to drama school, for her sake) to be replaced by someone I could have sworn played a psychiatrist in season one, but who now heads up one of those “special crime units”, a phrase synonymous with “weekly cop show serial”. So, new sets and a slightly new dynamic, but of course writer Neil Cross must have people intone “I was once your adversary, but now we must work together”, as though these alliances were the stuff of Wagnerian myth, filtered through Hollywood taglines.
The most intriguing relationship remains that between Luther and Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan, a calculating sociopath, currently incarcerated, and who Luther appears to be helping escape. Alice still has something of Millennium's Lucy Butler about her, and has the potential to be much more threatening than the villains-of-the-week who are trotted out, but the show continues to misuse her. It's as though two first-class actors had arrived prepared for a production of David Mamet's play Oleanna, but their director had re-heated some old CSI scripts instead. “Breathtakingly unerotic” she says of her surroundings, and she's right: beyond her and Luther's relationship (or rather, the potential of the relationship) the show has no sex and no passion. It wants to evoke a nightmarish city of gothic threat, but can't do better than some shadowy basements and hand-held pseudo-porn.
At least Luther avoids cod-rationality, and one can sense forces within pulling it to a darker place, a more scatological and anarchic territory of pain, suffering, but also delight. Bolted down and sealed up by rigorously dull plotting, these impulses simmer away, almost invisible. Yet there's something perverse in the colours of the outfit worn by the young woman Luther saves from consensual rape, and the hint at even more tenebrous delights in the shackling of her to a chair in straight-laced even-voiced Paul McGann's gloomy loft conversion. No doubt this potential will be squandered, but an eager viewer has to take what they can get. Alice Morgan is still scheming away, and one of the most thrilling cliff-hangers for me is whether she'll escape prison before her brown roots start to show even more disastrously beneath that arterial blood-red dye job.
For all these faults (and many, many more) it's more engaging than the BBC's other big budget cop serial, the jaunt-y and Italian-y Rufus Sewell-fueled Zen. Luther's London may be no less unrealistic and painful to watch than that show's English-language Rome, but where Zen's de facto tone was “fun”, Luther at least has a mite of Satanic energy lurking somewhere within it - something only fair considering the inevitable cop-show ingredients of murder, insanity and lust. That may be enough to get me through another three hours of this second season, otherwise it might be time to throw the book at this show. Criminal offence? Pedalling in genre porn.
No comments:
Post a Comment