Yardie review: Idris Elba's directorial debut is sadly short on heart and soul

Matthew Norman31 August 2018

Like anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, I cannot get enough of the actor Idris Elba. From drug-dealing Stringer Bell in The Wire to Asgardian sentry Heimdall in the Marvel Universe, from his starring role in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to his spacecraft captain in Prometheus, he never met a line he didn’t nail or a scene he didn’t improve.

Next James Bond or not (not, according to the man himself), he could star in Speaking Clock and spend two hours intoning “At the third stroke, the time sponsored by Accurist will be…” 720 times, and I’d go to the cinema for that.

All of which is a tediously gushing preamble to the pained admission that, for now at least, though it’s the earliest of days, the director Idris Elba is another matter.

In Yardie, his passion-project debut behind the camera, there are some promising signs. Elba tells the tale of a basically good Jamaican boy propelled to badness by grief with visual flair.

In the early scenes he adroitly juxtaposes the lush beauty of Jamaica’s mountains with the bullet-ridden bleakness of wild west Kingston’s dirt-track roads. He gets up close to the action to paint a vivid portrait of a paradise lost to poverty and its blood brother, violence.

What he lacks, when the plot moves to London, is perspective. He never draws far enough back from the (overly intricate) narrative to decide what he wants to say. He has an eye for framing a shot but little vision. He has an ear for dialogue but seems rather deaf to the themes that lurk beneath the words.

With a stronger story this would matter less. But the tale of Dennis Campbell (Aml Ameen), known as D, feels less original and engrossing today than a quarter of a century ago when Elba, as a young Hackneyite, was wowed by Victor Headley’s ground-breaking 1992 novel.

That flatter-to-deceive opening shows 10-year-old D being brutalised by two murders — the first of a schoolgirl friend caught in drug-gang crossfire; the second of his older brother, known for rasta-locks reasons as Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary), who he worships.

Yardie - In pictures

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In 1973 Jerry DJs an impromptu gig he hopes will unite warring Kingston gangs in reggae harmony. With his One Love concert in 1978 Bob Marley (who doesn’t feature alongside Black Uhuru, Grace Jones and others on the gorgeous soundtrack) tried something similar on a grander political scale — with similarly blood-soaked results. Jerry is leading the crowd in the chant “No more war in the ghetto” when someone misinterprets the message and shoots him dead. This event, as a reflective D narrates, shunted him to a defining crossroads. “Do I take the righteous path, or the path of the damned?”

No holiday-of-a-lifetime star prize for guessing which. At 16, prey to psychotic jags and dreams of avenging Jerry, D is packing a piece in the employ of drug lord King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd), who a few years later sends him to London with a kilo of choicest cocaine strapped to his leg.

So far, so good… but no further. The moment D glides through an endearingly hands-off customs search at Heathrow the authentic flavour of the Jamaican scenes begins to evaporate.

It never wholly vanishes thanks to rigorous attention to period detail that goes beyond the clothes and cars. The shots of desolate tower blocks and underlit streets perfectly recreate the desolation of 1980s east London. In the club scenes, where rival “soundclash” crews preface the rap contests to come, you can almost smell the mixed scent of ganja and sweat.

After D tracks down nurse Yvonne (Shantol Jackson, the standout performer here), who fled Kingston with their baby and rages at him for revisiting on them the violence she thought they’d escaped, their relationship has real ice and fire.

It’s in the gangstery stuff that Elba loses the plot. Marooned between Guy Ritchie’s facetious geezerdom and the visceral brutality of Martin Scorsese, he gives in to broad-brush retro silliness until you half expect John Thaw and Dennis Waterman to rap on Yvonne’s door, yelling “Oi, open up, you slaaaag. It’s the Sweeney.”

When D isn’t hallucinating the brother whose spirit he kept from eternal rest by interrupting his funeral, he mixes with some unlikely hoods. Rico (Stephen Graham), the drug baron to whom he was supposed to deliver the cocaine, is a raving mad white man who switches at random between Jamaican patois and Kraytwinese. The teenaged henchmen Rico sends to recover his missing “flake” include a sweetly soppy boy who might be auditioning for Rodney in an Only Fools And Horses musical. Like the eruptions of strangely anodyne violence, none of it feels real.

A talented Anglo-Jamaican cast do their best to mask the humourlessness of a patchy script and the threadbare characterisation, though this film would have been stronger, as if it needs saying, had Elba joined them on screen.

There is so much to be said about the experience of Caribbean immigrants to an unimaginably less welcoming city than, for all the Windrush outrage, it is today. Elba hints at the sense of dislocation for those who swapped one ghetto for a rainier alternative. But he doesn’t explore it in any more depth than he brings to D’s moral confliction and search for redemption.

If his first film often looks good and always sounds great, beneath its skin it is short of heart and soul. But nothing lies beyond the powers of a man who can charm you even when he’s flogging Sky subscriptions on telly. His second, I feel certain, will be better.

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