Yardie

Rialto Pictures | Release Date: March 15, 2019

6.5	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 12 Ratings

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JLuis_001Mar 20, 2021

Decent in terms of execution, but it lacks style, and its tone is completely uneven.

Idris Elba's decent debut as a director, but frankly it's worth more as a curiosity than as a film that deserves the attention of a bigger audience.

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Bertaut1Mar 25, 2019

Very little to get your teeth into

Yardie is the directorial debut of Idris Elba, and is about as pedestrian a film as you're likely to see all year; a listless gangland-based drama composed of a litany of gangster-film clichés. There are aVery little to get your teeth into

Yardie is the directorial debut of Idris Elba, and is about as pedestrian a film as you're likely to see all year; a listless gangland-based drama composed of a litany of gangster-film clichés. There are a couple of elements worth praising, and it's competently directed, but by and large, it's extremely shallow, containing nothing you haven't seen in half a dozen other films. For his first film, Elba seems to have settled on something personal, a story with whose milieu he is already familiar. However, the film is populated by generic characters, themes, and narrative beats; at best, it's fitfully interesting, at worst, it doesn't work at all, plodding along at its own imprecise pace, getting nowhere fast.

Based on Victor Headley's 1992 novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by Headley, Brock Norman Brock, and Martin Stellman, the film begins in Kingston, Jamaica in 1973, a town in the midst of a bloody gang-war. Sick of the violence, local man Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary) stages an impromptu block-party. All is going well, with Jerry even coaxing the two rival kingpins up on stage to shake hands. However, a youth in the crowd shoots Jerry dead, leaving his kid brother, D, distraught. Ten years later, D (Aml Ameen) has worked his way up the ranks of music producer/drug lord King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd), who was one of the men onstage when Jerry was killed. Fox packs D off to Hackney with a kilo of cocaine to be delivered to Fox's London connection, Rico (Stephen Graham). D is only too happy to go, as his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson) relocated to London several years earlier with their daughter, and they've been estranged ever since. However, upon meeting Rico, he and D rub each other up the wrong way, and D flees with the cocaine.

Pretty much everything in Yardie looks completely authentic, almost documentarian. Similarly, the soundtrack isn't simply representative of monolithic 70s/80s, but actually gives the film its rhythm, with Elba choosing songs of great cultural significance - tracks such as Lord Creator's "Kingston Town" (1970), The Isley Brothers' "Work to Do" (1972), Max Romeo & The Upsetters' "War Ina Babylon" (1976), Black Uhuru's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1979), and Grace Jones's "My Jamaican Guy" (1983).

This sense of authenticity is carried into an aspect of the film with which I'm sure a lot of people will have problems - the dialogue is delivered entirely in heavy Pathois, without any subtitles. Personally, I think this is an admirable decision; nothing takes you out of a film quicker than English subtitles for spoken English. And although there is no doubt that it's hard to understand some of what is said, and a few of the character beats are probably lost as a result, David Ehrlich's ludicrous assertion that "40% of the movie is unintelligible" in his damning IndieWire review is absolute rubbish. It's really no different from seeing an English Renaissance play or reading Chaucer - once you acclimate yourself to it, there shouldn't be any major problems.

The mise en scène really evokes a place and culture too, as Elba does a fine job of indoctrinating the viewer into the cadences of the culture. This aspect of authenticity is matched in the props; according to production designer Damien Creagh, almost nothing was custom made for the film, with the vast majority of props being working examples of the period.

Unfortunately, however, the rest of the film is extremely poor. Firstly, we've seen this film before, dozens of times - the gangster with a heart of gold wrestling with his loyalty and his desire to go straight, with only the love of a good woman to help guide him - and there's not an original character in the mix, with every single one of the principal cast coming across like they've been assembled from a "make your own" movie clichés modelling kit. The directionless plot also displays no real sense of dramatic intent, jumping from one thing to the next, often with little causality linking the two.

The problem is, simply put, that the narrative is so much weaker than the milieu containing it. Certainly not a problem exclusive to this film (if you've seen anything Ridley Scott has done post-Gladiator (2000), you're already familiar with this issue), but it's especially pronounced here because a) the narrative is so derivative, and b) the milieu is so strongly evoked. The film is too enamoured with the tropes of the gangster movie to work as a genre subversion, nor is it pulpy enough to be enjoyed for its excess, à la something like Scarface (1983) or Romeo Is Bleeding (1993). It occupies this inoffensive, vanilla middle ground, not really doing a huge amount wrong, but not really doing a huge amount right either.… Expand

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