Idris Elba (2018)
I should have gone to a subtitled screening of Yardie. The story isn’t difficult to follow but I couldn’t make out a lot of the dialogue. Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman, although he doesn’t rate Idris Elba’s directing debut highly, applauds ‘Elba’s boldest creative choice: an admirable refusal to soften the Jamaican patois of the characters’. I’m not sure Yardie is quite as bold as that suggests. In the early part of the film, set in Kingston, Jamaica, Elba uses a lot of voiceover – from the protagonist Dennis ‘D’ Campbell (Aml Ameen) – which is more decipherable than the dialogue. When D comes over to London the voiceover quotient drops as the level of self-explanatory visual action rises.
D has never forgotten the caution of his elder brother Jerry (Everaldo Cleary) that a man must choose between the path of righteousness and the path of damnation. Nor has he forgotten witnessing, when he was still a kid (Antwayne Nicholson), Jerry’s murder, as he tried to force peace between two rival Kingston gangs. For a commercial crime thriller, there’s no choice between the two paths; for a Jamaica-based crime thriller, the combination of drug-dealing and music in Yardie is also to be expected. King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd), the protagonist’s boss-cum-father-figure, is a crime lord and a reggae producer who, after Jerry’s death, took young D under his wing. Ten years later (in the late 1970s or early 1980s?) King Fox dispatches D to London to deliver cocaine to Rico (Stephen Graham), a mixed-race gangster based in Hackney. Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), D’s former girlfriend, is already in London, having moved there in search of ‘a new start’. She has a young daughter, Vanessa (Myla-Rae Hutchinson-Dunwell), fathered by D, and he moves in with them. He soon discovers that his brother’s killer is in the area too. D faces a new and more specific moral choice, whether or not to exact revenge.
Once he’s met the psychotic Rico, D thinks better of handing over the cocaine to him. Instead, he makes off with it and gets in with some reggae DJs who know a Turkish dealer (Akin Gazi) able to move the drugs. The shift in the action from Kingston to London makes the film’s title all the more apt: in Jamaica, ‘yardie’ can simply mean a fellow Jamaican; in the UK, it refers to a West Indian gangster. While their menfolk are into crime and reggae, the under-represented Jamaican women characters are responsible citizens: Yvonne works for the NHS and goes to church. The gendered roles are most obvious in a scene that leads into the big finish. Mona (Naomi Ackie, from Lady Macbeth) is the girlfriend of Piper (Fraser James), the killer of D’s brother. She and Yvonne pay peacemaking visits to D and Piper respectively. Their efforts aren’t enough to prevent Yardie‘s climactic mayhem, though at least the women, unlike most of the supporting characters, get out of the film alive.
The plot is no great shakes (the screenplay by Brock Norman Brock and Martin Stellman is adapted from a 1992 novel by Victor Headley) and Idris Elba doesn’t show flair or imagination enough to elevate the material. He often does better directing his actors. Aml Ameen is at his most freely expressive in D’s scenes with his little daughter. As one of the young DJs, Calvin Demba is increasingly appealing (and easy to understand): it’s altogether a pity when his character is soon killed off. Perhaps Yardie‘s most interesting scene, thanks to its relative ambiguity, is the very last. D is with Yvonne and Vanessa in a London park. His voiceover recalls again the two paths choice. It’s not clear if he’ll now put his criminal past behind him or if this pacific family scene is merely an intermission.
5 September 2018
