Product Description
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Golden Globe Winner Idris Elba (The Wire, American Gangster)
stars as Detective John Luther in this thrilling new crime series
from BBC America. A self-destructive near-genius, Luther might
just be as dangerous as the depraved criminals he hunts. Luther
follows his own moral code as much as the rules of criminal law.
But he quickly becomes locked in a lethal battle of wits with
Alice (Ruth Wilson, The Prisoner, Jane Eyre), a beautiful, highly
intelligent mass murderer, and his decision-making process
becomes increasingly murky. The strain begins to tell as he’s
drawn deeper and deeper into a series of horrific murders, and
the shadow of a former case threatens to bring him down. Forced
to face his own capacity for violence, he struggles with why his
wife left him and what draws him to Alice. As the stakes get
higher and more personal, Luther’s lonely path pulls him towards
the very edge of temptation. Is he a force for good or a man hell
bent on self-destruction?
.com
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Idris Elba is the magnetic star of the thrilling BBC
series Luther, a gritty, captivating drama that will impress fans
of British TV, procedurals, and knotty character studies.
Elba (The Wire, The Big C, The Office, 28 Days Later) is a
nuanced, tortured presence as DCI John Luther, a detective
focused on understanding the most horrifying criminal mind.
Luther also has sacrificed a normal personal life for his work,
and Luther focuses on his back-story as much as on the plot at
hand. The supporting cast is as brilliant as Elba, especially
Indira Varma as his estranged wife, Zoe, and Ruth Wilson as the
fragile-seeming but only marginally sane Alice, with whom Luther
has been having a secret affair. The episodes are fairly
straightforward procedurals, including serial killers and
other creepy bad guys. But what keeps Luther extra engaging is
the superior writing, direction, and production design--making
watching Luther an immersive experience for the viewer. And it's
not always a comfortable one--this is not the cleaned-up New York
of Law & Order, where most bad things happen off screen. Luther's
bad guys (and gals) commit their evil deeds on camera and
sometimes in slow motion--which only heightens the suspense and
deep feeling of immersion. Luther and its focus on its leading
character's personal life owes a lot to Helen Mirren's Prime
Suspect, but Elba and the supporting cast of Luther do even more
to make the viewer feel a part of the imperfect British
law- system. The boxed set includes an excellent
documentary with interviews with series creator Neil Cross and
the directors and cast members discussing how they deliberately
designed the series to be more "impressionistic" than "realistic"
in terms of plot. (The interviews would have more impact if they
weren't streamed onto a computer screen, but that's a small
quibble.) Catch Luther while he tries to catch the bad blokes,
and enjoy every twisted step of the journey. --A.T. Hurley