Idris Elba’s effort is valiant, but flawed
Yardie 15 cert, 102 min ★★★☆☆ Dir Idris Elba
Starring Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Calvin Demba, Everaldo Creary, Sheldon Shepherd, Fraser James
Idris Elba’s achievement in Yardie is directing a debut feature that does him absolutely no disgrace, and bodes well for further forays behind the camera, while not really coming off. Any first film is agony to make, and this one can’t help flag up the difficulty of its labour rather than fully immersing you as storytelling. Even when it’s accomplished, it’s naggingly remote.
The ambition of the piece – a period crime picture taking us from 1973 Jamaica to East London in the Eighties – is never in doubt. It’s based on the 1992 cult bestseller of the same name by Jamaica-born Victor Headley: a story of migration infused with danger, as main character D (Aml Ameen) crosses to the UK with a package of cocaine strapped to his leg. This comes years after the murder of his older brother at a street party in Kingston, where he is Djing to forge a truce between rival gangs: an unsolved mystery, long in the unravelling, and practically dropped by the script for a full hour.
By rights, Yardie should hit a major slump in the middle, as D tries to go straight in London, juggling fatherhood with fending off his own criminal past, yet it’s impressive how watchable it remains. It’s partly down to the talents of cinematographer John Conroy, whom Elba has remembered and rehired from his Luther days. Shot with a prowling eye for colour and bustle, the film is just as livid and vivid on either side of the Atlantic.
Several key actors boost it: Ameen, often resembling a young Don Cheadle, carries the film with the kind of simmering authority that’s an Elba trademark in front of the camera, and Shantol Jackson, as his wary girlfriend Yvonne, gives it some fire and rage. Supporting honours are stolen, though, by ex-hollyoaks actor Calvin Demba, playing a coltish new associate of D’s and injecting some vital humour.
Both the Windrush scandal and ongoing waves of knife crime give Yardie theoretical jolts of resonance for now. There’s a scary sequence when D, inexperienced at looking after his young daughter, permits a game of hide and seek on a housing estate, and she vanishes. But the film’s broad structure isn’t compelling enough, and you have an inkling Elba knows it from the start: he resorts to a Scorsese-ish voice-over that doesn’t feel like it’s emanating properly from the face on screen.
Given the director’s credentials as a DJ in his own right, the reggae dominated soundtrack should be more of a selling point than it is, too. Or perhaps the ideal of Jamaican music as a force for harmony, which the script drops as backdrop, ought to have been the redemptive focus of D’s story. Instead, watching the trajectory of violence come full circle has a deadening irony, undercutting every noble cry for “no more war in the ghetto”, whether on purpose or not.
Perhaps Elba, who has said he wants to try a musical next, simply picked up the wrong book: he tries hard with Yardie, but it never quite flies.