Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely smash it as a narrative about the Jamaican-British experience as there have been so few. But, alas, it is a disappointment. It is patchy. It’s not paced excitingly. The characters are insufficiently drawn. And I struggled with the thick Jamaican patois, I must confess. I was often muddled, yet whether it was due to that or the plot was muddled anyway, I cannot say for sure.
This is based on Victory Headley’s cult novel, first published in 1992, and is set in Jamaica and then London in the early 1980s. It opens in Jamaica, in the ravishing countryside. This is home to 10-year old Dennis, known as ‘D’, and his older brother, Jerry (Everaldo Creary). There don’t seem to be any parents on the scene, and D adores Jerry. Kingston is their nearest town, and after a little girl gets killed in the crossfire between two gangs, Jerry wants to bring peace, so he hosts a big party in one of the no-go areas in the hopes of bringing everyone together. I think this is what was happening, anyhow, and it does lead to a heavenly dance scene which, at this stage of the game, made me rather optimistic. But then Jerry is shot dead, and I knew we weren’t entirely in safe hands, directorially, when D fell to his knees, cradled Jerry, and bellowed: ‘Noooooooooo!’. He then looked up with a face that was pure Revenge Face.
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