Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Yardie’ on Amazon Prime, Director Idris Elba’s Vivid Jamaican-Gangster Saga

Amazon Prime’s Yardie is the feature-length directorial debut from Idris Elba, the TV and film star best known for The Wire, Luther, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and a half-decade’s worth of James Bond casting rumors. Based on a novel by author Victor Headley named after the slang term for Jamaican gangs, the film is a 1970s-80s period piece about a young man’s entanglements with organized criminals whose web stretches from Kingston to London.

YARDIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kingston, 1973. Young Dennis, a.k.a. D (Antwayne Eccleston), idolizes his big brother, Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary), a peacenik music lover. Deeply upset by countless shootouts between gangsters in the Kingston slums, Jerry Dread sets up his sound system and throws a party, hoping to negotiate peace between the warring parties. It almost works. On the brink of a truce, Jerry Dread is gunned down. Distraught, D disrupts the funeral ceremony, rendering Jerry Dread unable to make the journey to the other side — and D frequently sees his ghost watching over him.

But this isn’t a supernatural story. A decade later, the adult D (Aml Ameen) is the right-hand man of King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd), a music producer and one of Kingston’s ruling mobsters. King Fox “is like a father” to D, who’s upbeat, but ultimately heartbroken and impulsive. He’s obsessed with exacting revenge on Jerry Dread’s murderer; his girlfriend Yvonne (Shantol Jackson) took their three-year-old daughter to London, hoping for a better life. When he gets in trouble, King Fox shuttles him to London to lay low for a bit — and deliver a big sack of cocaine to Rico (Stephen Graham), a screwball nightclub operator.

The new setting is an opportunity for D to make all the wrong decisions — which also might be the right decisions? It’s hard to tell. He doesn’t like the whiff of Rico, and instead sells the drugs himself, using the money to boost a local music crew (like his brother, Rico is a gifted dub-reggae freestyle vocalist), and to sow goodwill with Yvonne and his daughter. But, as you might expect, his lack of loyalty to King Fox catches up to him, and the revelation that his brother’s killer (Riaze Foster) is also holed up in London becomes an all-consuming distraction from the things that are important in his life.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Although the Jamaican characters and music give the film a fresh veneer, it’s ultimately a familiar gangster-morality tale with roots in everything from Scarface to Goodfellas.

Performance Worth Watching: Yvonne doesn’t always break the mold of the conflicted gangster’s-wife type; predictably, she’s torn between loving the man and hating what he does. But Jackson does some terrific character work in the role, especially in a scene deep in the third act when she takes it upon herself to confront Jerry Dread’s killer.

Memorable Dialogue: “Will you go with the righteous or will you go with the damned?” D asks rhetorically in voiceover narration at the beginning of the movie. The idea is revisited at the end, with a corollary: “Sometimes a man has to choose his own path.”

Single Best Shot: An ant’s-eye view of a kick to the yarbles is an amusing low angle on a low blow.

Sex and Skin: A little bit of pent-up yearning is released when D and Yvonne reconnect after a long time apart.

Our Take: A word of advice: turn on the subtitles. In some scenes, the Jamaican cadence collides head on with Cockney accents, and you’ll struggle to taste the ice cream beneath dense layers of caramel and hot fudge, so to speak.

Plot-wise, Yardie indulges some predictable contrivances, and as a protagonist, D can be a frustrating jumble of motives summed up all too simply: He’s traumatized! So he makes lousy decisions! Ameen is a charismatic actor, and foregoes typical tortured-gangbanger tropes for a lighter approach. It works, but you’ll wish the character had been written outside the lines of the familiar righteous-struggle/revenge arc.

Elba, however, shows considerable talent behind the camera, thoroughly capturing the audio-visual textures of the time. He uses music strategically, for immersive effect, and as a fruitful method of escape and expression for D. John Conroy’s cinematography is thoughtful and creative, but not overly showy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Although the story won’t stick with you, Yardie is inspired visually, and worth watching for Elba’s vivid direction.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Yardie on Amazon Prime