Set in '70s Kingston and '80s Hackney, Yardie centres on the life of a young Jamaican man named D (Aml Ameen), who has never fully recovered from the murder, committed during his childhood, of his older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary). D grows up under the wing of a Kingston Don and music producer named King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Fox dispatches him to London, where he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), and his daughter who he's not seen since she was a baby. He also hooks up with a soundclash crew, called High Noon. But before he can be convinced to abandon his life of crime and follow 'the righteous path', he encounters the man who shot his brother 10 years earlier, and embarks on a bloody, explosive quest for retribution - a quest which brings him into conflict with vicious London gangster Rico (Stephen Graham).
You'd never accuse Yardie...of being a particularly original yarn, but its attention to style, music and language...lends it enough verve to stand on its own.
This is a film about the pressures and demands of making another country your own. Too often, however, the viewer will feel as befuddled as the protagonist.
"Yardie" has the right look, the right sound and the right moves to play with the bigger boys of its genre; like its young, scrappy but naive hero, however, there's not quite enough power behind its posturing.
Throughout the messy experience of "Yardie," [Idris] Elba's interest in storytelling gets ahead of his lacking visual instincts. Though I'm curious to see what story he tells next, Elba proves to not yet have an original voice behind the camera.
This messy, disjointed film marks the directorial debut of Idris Elba and it gives me little pleasure to state that he should stick to working in front of the camera instead of behind it.
Obviously Idris Elba is very well-versed in the music and the style and the cultures that this story is dealing with and he evokes them in such a way that you feel that you are really there.
As it stands, Yardie seldom amounts to anything more than a collection of vaguely related scenes, simultaneously both too muddled and too straightforward to have any resonance beyond the moment at hand.
