Yardie review: Idris Elba's feature debut is an invigorating ride

Dir: Idris Elba, 101 mins, starring: Aml Ameen, Everaldo Creary, Sheldon Shepherd, Shantol Jackson, Stephen Graham, Fraser James

Anyone who enjoyed Jimmy Cliff in reggae gangster classic, The Harder They Come, should have a good time too with Idris Elba’s debut feature as a director. Based on a novel by Victor Headley, this is another equally flamboyant yarn about a young Jamaican taking a wrong turn.

Right from the outset, Elba gives his film a mythic dimension. Yardie isn’t a realist drama about drug smuggling petty thieves. It’s a story of a youngster at a symbolic crossroads. He can either take the “righteous” path or go with the “damned.” We know he’ll take the second option.

After all, the devil’s way makes for much more colourful drama. Yardie even has a supernatural element. At the bleakest moments, its hero always sees the spirit of a dead man who hasn’t crossed peacefully to the other side.

Dennis “D” (played as a boy by Antwayne Eccleston and as an adult by Aml Ameen) has a remarkably cheerful disposition. Nothing gets him down for long. When close relatives or friends are killed in front of him, the grief is very quickly forgotten. He may be on a quest for revenge but he goes about the business of retribution in a very laid back manner.

“D” is first seen growing up in the Jamaica of the early 1970s (the period in which The Harder They Come is set). Elba and his cinematographer John Conroy show the Jamaican countryside as lush and very beautiful – an Edenic wilderness. In Kingston, though, the violence is rife.

The rival Tampa and Spicer gangs are vying for supremacy and innocent bystanders (including a young school girl) are being killed in the crossfire. D’s older, rasta DJ brother, Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary) tries to act as peacemaker.

Like Bob Marley with his One Love concert which brought political rivals Michael Manley and Edward Seaga together, Jerry calls the gang leaders on stage at a music event and stands between them, as if he is Jesus alongside the two thieves. Reconciliation is achieved for a moment or two but the mayhem which follows defines D’s life.

Most of the film takes place in London in 1983, a decade after Jerry’s death. It’s here D has been sent by his dapper gangster boss King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd) to deliver drugs to an English contact, Rico (Stephen Graham), one of the few white characters in the film.

Yardie is very stylised. The filmmakers deliberately avoid providing too much social or political context. They use voiceover to fill in any gaps in the plot. There are no references to Margaret Thatcher or the huge levels of unemployment in Britain at the time.

Although characters are shown openly roaming the streets with guns and machetes, the police barely feature either. They’re either incompetent or uninterested. The same applies to the customs officers at the British border who blithely wave through Jamaicans carrying drugs without thinking to search them. Music is crucial to the film, not just for establishing atmosphere but as a means of expression, a tool for peace and sometimes one for aggression.

In terms of its sexual politics, the film isn’t remotely progressive. There are no strong female characters here. The screenplay skims over D’s relationship with his childhood sweetheart Yvonne. We are told abruptly that he has had a child with her but that she has moved to the UK in search of a better life.

Yvonne (played as an adult by Shantol Jackson) now has a job as a nurse. She is remarkably forgiving when D turns up out of nowhere, buys their daughter a doll’s house with his drugs money and brings gang warfare to her doorstep.

Yardie is full of improbabilities and non-sequiturs. D can hurt his leg badly and be smashed by a car but still manage to run away to safety. He is untroubled by any pangs of conscience as he causes death and destruction even to those close to him.

Characters here always seem to make bad decisions when it comes to letting enemies escape or allowing them secretly to telephone for back up. The plot, though, isn’t the point. The film’s strength is its characterisation and its relentless energy.

Stephen Graham buzzes some of the same bristling menace he showed as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire to his role as Rico, the pint-sized London gangland boss. It’s a fiery performance but one with a comic undertow. Rico loves to speak in Jamaican patois and then suddenly switch to East End vernacular.

Sheldon Shepherd is wonderfully flamboyant as King Fox, the narcissistic and ruthless criminal boss and music entrepreneur who dresses like one of the heavies in Live And Let Die. Calvin Demba is likeably naive as DJ Sticks, the youngster who tries to rob D to raise money for his “sound crew.” Elba contrasts the Yardies with the equally violent, equally colourful Turkish gangs in Green Lanes.

At times, the humour and the violence sit uncomfortably together. D is a likeable, wide-eyed youngster but that doesn’t stop him killing people or betraying his bosses and profiteering. It doesn’t help, either, for the dramatic momentum that D’s main antagonist turns out to be a bit of a non-entity.

Idris Elba brings as much attitude and invention to his directing as he does to his acting. The problems with Yardie are with the stuttering storyline, not with its performances or its scene-setting. The film doesn’t work at all as a hardboiled gangster picture.

Its plot is riddled with holes. However, taken as modern-day folklore – as a music-driven cautionary tale about a young Jamaican rake’s progress – it is an invigorating ride.

‘Yardie’ is in UK cinemas from 31 August