Yardie

Offers little to get your teeth into

Studio One selection after Studio One selection. The selector had the dancers where he wanted them, begging for more. Nobody who understood the history and roots of reggae could resist any record on the legendary Studio One label. From its Brentford Road headquarters in Kingston, Studio One and its founder Clement Dodd had encapsulated every form of reggae expression. His were the original bass lines, the original bass lines, the original drum patterns still borrowed from heavily by contemporary reggae producers and US rappers. Somehow, no other rhythms in reggae seemed to swing as perfectly as a Studio One rhythm.

• Victor Headley; Yardie (1992)

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. I wish it wasn't so; I'm a big Elba fan (who isn't), but, let's face it, a lot of his post-Stringer Bell acting work has been poor, to say the least – Guy Ritchie's RockNRolla (2008), David S. Goyer's The Unborn (2009), Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012), Sam Miller's No Good Deed (2014), James Watkins's Bastille Day (2016), Nikolaj Arcel's The Dark Tower (2017); hardly an impressive CV. Still though, for his first film in the director's chair, I was hopeful he might chose a project with a little more care than he seems to be choosing his acting roles. And whilst he certainly seems to have settled on something personal, a story with whose milieu he is already familiar, 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. And the...

Brought up in an almost tribally violent Kingston in the 1970s, the young "D" (Antwayne Eccleston) is witness to the brutal murder of his brother "Jerry" but luckily adopted by the local kingpin "Fox" (Sheldon Shepherd) who ends up sending him to London. It's here that he rendezvous with his ex-girlfriend "Yvonne" (Shantol Jackson) who fled some years earlier with their son - whom he hasn't seen since. He lands on his feet, rather, falling into the company of a band of musicians but before he can embark on a career with them, he encounters the man who slaughtered his brother a decade earlier. A red mist descends on "D" (now Aml Ameen) and no persuasion or pleading can divert him from a dangerous course of revenge that is setting a course for a clash with the ruthless "Rico" (Stephen Graham). As the violence escalates and his behaviour puts not just him, but his family and friends in deadly peril, we build to a denouement that turns their London streets back into a section of the lawless Jamaica they had left. This is clearly a labour of love for director Idris Elba and for a while it works quite well. There's plenty of convincing patois and the story illustrates well their sense of community and loyalty. Pretty quickly, though, the wheels begin to come off and the whole thing descends into a rather procedural crime drama that resorts just a little too much to stereotype and puts Stephen Graham in the most unlikely of characterisations. It's violent, but not especially gratuitous and the writing does take a swipe at the futility of the never ending cycle of revenge begetting more revenge - but once we get into the thrust of the thing it is derivative and unimaginatively developed until a conclusion that you could have seen from space. The acting - especially from Ameen - isn't bad at all and it's by no means a bad film, but if you'd brought on Helen Mirren it could easily have been better made into a two part "Prime Suspect" drama.