Akilla’s Escape: Jamaican American crime drama that prizes ambience over originality

“Rejected by society / Treated with impunity / Protected by my dignity / I search for reality,” Bob Marley sings over stock footage of political strife in Jamaica. The lyrics of the title sequence serve as a succinct synopsis of Charles Officer’s new crime drama Akilla’s Escape. Amidst the tragic chaos of the news, a man dances to the music, encapsulating the dichotomy between the joyfulness of Jamaican culture and the deadly violence that overshadows it.

We first see Akilla Brown as a younq teenager (Thamela Mpumlwana) in a police interrogation room being quizzed about the death of his father, who we learn was a member of a dangerous drug gang. Flash forward to modern-day Toronto and Akilla (Saul Williams, of Slam fame) has become a veteran of the gangs, a dealer in marijuana. Now, he’s winding down his business as the Canadian government cracks down – not as part of a war on drugs but because the trade has been legalised and there’s money to be made. His artisan colleague Benji (Colm Feore) bemoans the loss but Akilla is adamant he doesn’t want to become “the Starbucks of grass”. One last delivery must be made, however, and in doing so Akilla interrupts a robbery.

What ensues is a redemption song of a kind. Following the robbery, Akilla finds himself in possession of one of the thieves, an epileptic kid called Sheppard, and wants at once to interrogate him but also protect him from the more extreme forms of violence that Akilla’s employer, the Greek, would perpetrate. Akilla identifies with Sheppard (unsurprisingly, given he is played by the same Thamela Mpumlwana who appears as young Akilla), which puts him on a collision course with the Greek’s enforcer Jimmy (Bruce Ramsay). All the while he is assailed by flashbacks to a ’90s New York that show young Akilla undergoing his brutal initiation into gang life by his abusive father Clinton (Ronnie Rowe). “Your father is the product of a people torn apart,” he is told by his mother Thetis (Olunike Adeliyi), who is also a victim of the man’s abuse. It’s a line that feels at once too on-the-nose and wholly inadequate. This could also be said for the rest of the film.

The crime genre has a long history of exploring divergent subcultures, albeit in an inevitably ambivalent light – they are, after all, crime dramas. The Italian American experience is only the most frequent: we’ve had the Irish in The Departed (2006), the Jewish in Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and the Russian mafia in Eastern Promises (2007). In Akilla’s Escape, Officer and his co-screenwriter Wendy Motion Brathwaite commit to the weight of history that comes with the Jamaican diaspora. Akilla is trying to escape his own wrong beginnings as much as he is the criminal life; Williams is riveting as a man attempting to get out from under that weight, projecting the dignity Bob Marley sings about at the opening. His stare evokes callused experience but is also able to freeze a room.

The film’s images are clean and symmetrical, and Maya Bankovic’s camera creates a slick, almost gentrified vision of the underworld. Meetings take place in tasteful restaurants and Akilla’s apartment is bathed in violet light, as if he’s developing photos. This places the film much more in the tradition of Michael Mann-inspired neo-noir rather than the gritty lo-fi grunge of Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972). Characters talk in portentous aphorisms. Like Tony Soprano, Clinton has a penchant for quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and, when Homer gets an outing (fittingly, considering characters have names like the Greek and Akilla), one of the characters defensively retorts: “I read.” The subtext is pretty much all text here.

Officer is aware enough of the clichés to subvert some of them – the revelation of the identity of the Greek being a case in point – but other times he wholeheartedly embraces them, and too much here feels like familiar crime genre fare. Particularly egregious are the one-last-job aspect as well as a lightning-quick romance that develops between Akilla and Sheppard’s aunt (Donisha Rita Claire Prendergast, a granddaughter of Bob Marley) for no discernible reason other than the ticking of a box. With music by Williams and Massive Attack’s 3D (Robert Del Naja), Akilla’s Escape certainly has a vibe and much to recommend it, but despite the distinctiveness of its subject it ultimately struggles to distinguish itself from so many other entries in the genre.

► Akilla’s Escape is in UK cinemas now.