Film Review: Yardie

"I Sent You To London So You Wouldn't Start A War In Kingston..."

With hot rumours surfacing of him taking the role of the next James Bond and the return of BBC's hit crime drama, Luther, in the near future, it's fair to say that Idris Elba is indeed a busy, busy man, and with a fundamental warmth and undeniable likeability, Elba's career seems to be going from strength to strength even when the steely-eyed few still remember Elba's superb performance as Stringer Bell in the greatest television programme of all time, The Wire. It comes with a particularly heavy heart therefore that Elba's directorial debut, a hazy adaptation of Victor Headley's 1992 cult novel, Yardie, is unfortunately a plodding, strangely dull and overly cliched crime drama which fails to ignite the touchpaper of Elba's switch from in front of the camera to behind it. With dedicated performances from many newcomers within the cast, an eclectic mix of groovy musical accompaniments and an obvious love for the source material from Elba, Yardie isn't exactly terrible, but its' major flaws are so crushingly obvious that it's hard to paint over the cracks in order to make the film better than it really is. 

Focusing on Aml Ameen's (Kidulthood) Dennis "D" Campbell and his rise within the criminal underworld of a poverty stricken Kingston, Jamaica, the early exposition of the movie is recalled through the age-old use of voice-over, and whilst my own personal preference for storytelling undoubtedly favours a "show me, not tell me" format, Elba's particular narrative technique does quickly become overly cheap and relatively boring as every single movement is described when the audience is already ten steps ahead.  With the movie primarily suffering from an utter lack of effective characterisation which results in the film simply being observed than truly being sucked into the drama, the overly familiar gangster set-up fails to carry any fresh ideas, even when its' key characters on the surface are interesting but are unfortunately let down by poor writing and dialogue which is as hokey as it is sometimes undecipherable. With a groovy soundtrack and some smokey, 70's era London cinematography, Elba's vision for the movie is admirable but with the whole much weaker than the sum of its' parts, Yardie is a yawn-inducing disappointment.  

Overall Score: 4/10