It gives me zero pleasure to report that Idris Elba’s first go as a feature film director, Yardie, is a disappointment. It was one of those screenings where you go in with your fingers crossed – who doesn’t love Idris Elba? – but eventually you have to stop kidding yourself. This movie isn’t just patchy: it simply doesn’t work.
This isn’t to say there aren’t moments that crackle. How could any film that includes Carlton and the Shoes’ 1968 song Love Me Forever on the soundtrack be all bad? That gorgeous tune breezes in during a prologue set in Jamaica in 1973. Our narrator D (Aml Ameen) is still a kid, and his big brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary) is hosting an ad-hoc block party to force peace between two rival gangs. For a brief moment when the entire neighborhood is dancing, Jerry Dread is toasting and the two kingpins shake hands, all is right with the world. Then a gunshot rings out, and Jerry Dread is dead.
The dance party sequence is truly sublime, but earlier in this same prologue there’s a moment when someone drops to their knees and shouts “nooooooo!” to the heavens. There’s no reconciling the two.
The bulk of Yardie (a Jamaican slang term often linked to criminal behavior outside of its homeland use) is set a decade later. D has been taken in by one of the rival gang leaders from that night – King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). King Fox is a music producer, but also drug dealer. After D causes a bit of an intra-underworld fuss when he thinks he spots his older brother’s assassin, he’s sent to London on a drug-running mission until things cool down.
As it happens, London is where his wife Yvonne (Shantol Jackson) and daughter have been living for three years “to make a better life”. We met Yvonne briefly in the prologue, and while there isn’t much screen time devoted to their burgeoning romance, it’s amazing what some perfectly shot glances can accomplish.
D meets his connection, Rico (Stephen Graham) but the mad look in his eye doesn’t pass D’s sniff test. He escapes with the cocaine and soon falls in with a group of reggae DJs who know a Turk who can move the stuff on the street. In time, D will get caught in the middle of a mafia war, will need to rescue his family, and also avenge the death of his brother Jerry Dread.
Victor Headley’s 1992 novel from which this film is adapted no doubt better tapped into the greater mythic aspects of this narrative. It sounds like the tale of a great, tragic reggae song. The film, however, drags along with one scene after another that has very little dramatic propulsion. It’s never quite clear what is driving D, or if he has some sort of master plan. Despite copious amount of voiceover narration, it’s unclear what his intentions are.
Toward the third act, characters show up out of the blue to blurt out twists that aren’t as revelatory as the movie wants them to be. (An older woman offering wise counsel gives a fine performance, but when I turned to my seat mates and asked “who is she?” no one had an answer. We suspect she was cut out of earlier scenes.) The few action scenes are all very rote. You’ve seen all this before.
And yet, when you see stills from this film you will be bowled over by the costumes and overall swagger of the performers, particularly Sheldon Shepherd as King Fox. Thanks to the music, it will certainly cut together into a fine trailer. But even the film’s climax, with D at the mic in an attempt at musical catharsis, doesn’t quite connect. All the elements are here for a great film, but Elba rarely gets beyond the surface of the 1980s Jamaican immigrant community. The rhythm track is there, perhaps it just needed a different singer.
- Yardie is showing as part of the Sundance film festival
