Yardie ** (2018, Aml Ameen, Stephen Graham, Fraser James ) – Movie Review

Idris Elba’s intriguing but shaky 2018 directorial debut Yardie is a decent and entertaining enough London gangland revenge crime thriller, but overall must count as a bit of disappointment. The problems are a weak period sense, some shaky performances, a cramped-feeling production and sometimes hesitant direction.

Martin Stellman and Brock Norman Brock’s adaptation of Victor Headley’s 1993 novel Yardie is not confident, strong or successful enough, recycling London gangster clichés and stereotypes to little fresh avail. Both the script and the production feel undernourished. Re-creating both Kingston in the Seventies and then Hackney in the Eighties is a tall order, and proves too much for the film to achieve fully. It never feels quite real, it is only ever a movie.

On the acting front, it is a real problem that Stephen Graham’s pivotal performance as vicious London gangland villain Rico is totally unbelievable and misjudged. Subsidiary roles like the hero’s childhood sweetheart Yvonne (Shantol Jackson) is just sketches, though her performance is solid.

Nevertheless, Aml Ameen is powerful as the main character named D [Dennis Campbell], a hero we can sympathise and identify with, and there are some insights and thriller excitements in the story. You believe in Ameen as much as you cannot believe in Graham. And Elba keeps his film suitably intense and atmospheric, and delivers some gangster genre thrills, accompanied with a good soundtrack.

The film opens in Seventies Kingston, Jamaica, where D’s older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary) is murdered. Ten years later, in the Eighties, Kingston music producer gangster King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd) sends D to London with a package of drugs. In Hackney, D encounters the man who shot his brother and sets out for revenge, clashing with the dreaded Rico.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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