Akilla’s Escape film review — bloody gangland drama is packed with plot

Set mostly in Toronto, just after the legalisation of marijuana shook up the criminal supply chain, the bloody gangland drama Akilla’s Escape offers a moreish mix of familiar genre tropes and stylish excess. Some might find writer-director Charles Officer’s film too overwrought, its tragic trajectory as straight as a gun barrel, but, like its flawed hero, played as an adult by actor-poet-polymath Saul Williams, there’s more good than bad here.

Mid-ranking weed distributor Akilla has been thinking about retiring from the business (always a mistake for any fictional character) when the newly legal dispensary that sells his product in collaboration with the local mafia gets robbed by some street kids. The invaders kill one of Akilla’s crew and leave behind a kid, Sheppard (the gifted Thamela Mpumlwana), a child soldier turned mute by a combination of PTSD and epilepsy. Thanks to an arty sleight of casting, Mpumlwana plays both Sheppard and the younger Akilla in flashbacks — underscoring how much Akilla sees himself in the boy. Like Sheppard, Akilla was pressured into a life of crime at a vulnerable age, in his case by his own abusive father (Ronnie Rowe).

That’s a lot of plot, which makes the dialogue dense even before we get to the scenes in which child prodigy Akilla quotes great chunks of Homer’s Iliad to demonstrate his intellectual prowess. Meanwhile, the evocative, jazz-and-hip-hop-infused soundtrack by 3D (aka Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja) and Williams features the latter reeling off some of his own cosmic poetry, which doesn’t have that much to do with the story but still sounds great.

The editing and cinematography are heavily stylised, which can make the film feel like a flighty distended music video at times, but Williams and Mpumlwana’s alert, compelling performances keep things grounded in grit.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas in the UK on August 26