TV review: Luther

The tough and uncompromising character, played by Idris Elba, won lots of fans in the first two series since he made his debut in May 2010.

Following his brilliant performance as Stringer Bell in US crime show The Wire, 40-year-old Elba has become an unmissable small screen performer and looks set to build a movie career to match.

He's just finished filming his role as Nelson Mandela in The Long Walk To Freedom, out in the new year, and there's already an Oscars buzz about it.

For now, though, the new four-part series of Luther, which promises to be even darker than before, began with Detective Chief Inspector Luther and sidekick Detective Sergeant Justin Ripley (Warren Brown) emerging from a blazing lock-up surrounded by armed police, with criminals firmly in their grasp.

The fast-paced and atmospherically-filmed show, written by Neil Cross, quickly had our hero, who has a talent for making enemies, embarking on two new murder investigations in tandem – while at the same time seeing him firmly in the sights of hunter of corrupt cops Detective Superintendent George Stark (David O'Hara) who wants to find out why so many people connected to Luther end up either dead or missing.

Luther is full of plot twists and does not stint on shocks and violence.

The emergence of a serial killer from underneath sleeping woman victim Emily Hammond's bed early on was the first of many scares in the opening episode.

DCI Luther wants to devote all his unconventional and brilliant killer catching skills to catching the twisted fetish killer who leaves the corpse dressed up to resemble punk rocker Siouxsie Sioux and regards the second case of finding out who killed internet troll Jared Cass, which he is ordered to take on by his boss, as a distraction from stopping the serial killer from striking again.

Aside from his troubles at work and his complicated sense of justice, Luther's personal life is still as much as a mess as it has been through the earlier series.

In one poignant scene he looks at a photograph of his dead ex-wife, whose loss still haunts him, with in the background a row of postcards from around the world from his would be lover and escaped psychopath killer Alice Morgan, who is set to make a return.

But things start looking up for the troubled cop when a car crash brings potential new love interest Mary Day (Sienna Guillory) into his life.

Luther's former team member Erin Gray (Nikki Amuka-Bird) however has little love for her former boss and is working with the driven and menacing Stark to find the evidence to prove him a bent copper.

Her initial efforts to convince the loyal Ripley to help are initially rejected but as Luther resorts to dangling a suspect from a tower block balcony he starts to change his mind and by the end of the episode his concern at Luther's handling of the Cass case has led him come to blows with his superior and believe that someone needs to stop him.

Series creator and scriptwriter Cross piles up plenty of unsettling images through the hour-long show with the appearance of the head of one victim of the serial killer's through a ceiling particularly shocking. Fortunately, the scene in which one suspect to the Cass killing took extreme methods to avoid being fingerprinted – with the help of an electric food blender – was left mainly to the viewer's imagination.

John Corser