Film review: Elba’s stunning debut is packed with real swagger

He’s helping his peace-loving brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary) set up a sound system in the “no-man’s land” that separates two local gangs. Jerry’s tunes get the whole neighbourhood dancing. Then D notices a boy in the crowd raise a gun. Jerry Dread is shot dead and D set on a path of revenge.

When we jump forward 10 years, D (Aml Ameen) has been recruited as a drug runner by gang boss and music impresario King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd).

After D nearly sparks another gang war, King Fox packs him off to London until things cool down.

To pay his way, he tasks him with delivering a kilo of cocaine to local dealer and club owner Rico, a white Jamaican played with relish by Stephen Graham.

As soon as D walks into Rico’s East End dancehall, he knows the unpredictable Rico is going to be a problem. D makes his escape with the cocaine and Rico’s heavies on his tail. After a thrilling night-time chase he makes his way to the East End block of flats where his childhood girlfriend Yvonne (Shantol Jackson) lives with their young daughter. Yvonne isn’t best pleased to learn the gang violence of her home town has followed her to London but Elba and his screenwriters have the good sense to intersperse the arguments with some very funny lines.

There is also welcome humour as D pairs up with a gang of local musicians to sell his stolen stash to white yuppies in partnership with the Turkish mafia.

As the tension begins to sag under the weight of side characters and subplots, you begin to suspect that Elba’s ambition will be brought down by his inexperience. But the revenge story is the least interesting thing about the film.

The performances, the witty dialogue, the bracingly authentic production design and the thumping soundtrack are what make this movie sing.

SEARCHING ★★★★★ (Cert 12A, 102mins)

I’ve seen this gimmick before but I’ve never seen a director use it as effectively as Aneesh Chaganty.

As with the two Unfriended films, the 27-year-old’s debut feature plays out entirely on screens of laptops and smartphones.

But while those two horror movies used modern technology for lurid thrills, this clever mystery thriller delves much deeper.

An ingenious and heartbreaking opening sequence uses online videos, social media posts and Google calendar entries to tell the life story of a 16-year-old girl.

This is Margot Kim, a quiet and sensible high school student who lives in California with her protective father David (Star Trek actor John Cho) after her mother died of cancer.

When Margot fails to come home from a study group, David’s first instinct is to open her laptop and search through her internet history. As the days go by, he teams up with a detective (Debra Messing) on FaceTime and embarks on a digital quest to find out what happened. As his investigation leads him to Margot’s secret video blog, he discovers he wasn’t as close to his daughter as he thought.

Chaganty, a former Google employee, knows how a list of missed calls can be used to devastating effect. But he also knows his way around more old-fashioned techniques. As the mystery intensifies, he showers us with red herrings and ties us up in knots with a series of clever twists.

But his greatest asset is his leading man. Cho is rarely off screen and he gives this digital masterpiece heart and flashes of humour.

UPGRADE ★★★★ (Cert 15, 100mins)

This gory, pulpy and gleefully preposterous sci-fi movie is best enjoyed if you don’t take it too seriously.

We are in America of the near future, glass-topped coffee tables have become giant smartphones, the sky is buzzing with police surveillance drones and the poshest cars drive themselves.

But mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is refusing to embrace the digital revolution. We know this because when we meet him he’s fixing up a 1970s muscle car and listening to Howlin’ Wolf… on vinyl.

But the Luddite has a dramatic change of heart after his wife (Melanie Vallejo) is shot dead and he is left paralysed by a gang of armed robbers.

The detective in charge of the case tells him that the gang somehow managed to hack the surveillance drones, making it very difficult to solve.

Then a sinister tech billionaire (is there any other sort?) called Eron sidles up to his hospital bed to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

He has developed a new experimental computer chip called Stem that will let him walk again.

His surgeons will put it in Trace’s spine if he agrees to keep it a secret. Trace agrees and the film goes completely off the rails.

It turns out Stem doesn’t just control his arms and legs but it can talk to him from inside his head in a voice reminiscent of Hal, the evil computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When he teams up with the chatty chip to track down his wife’s killers, the mild-mannered mechanic finds he has turned into a one-man killing machine.

If you’ve got a strong stomach and a love of the ridiculous, this riotous B-movie has been engineered for you.

THE MAN FROM MO’WAX ★★★★ (Cert 15, 113mins)

You can take this engrossing warts-and-all documentary about “trip hop” impresario James Lavelle in different ways.

Music lovers will savour grainy behind-the-scenes footage of DJ Shadow jamming with Thom Yorke and sessions featuring Brian Eno, Jarvis Cocker and Ian Brown.

For those of a more dramatic bent, this will be a powerful story of overreaching ambition, betrayal and redemption.

There’s also plenty for the cultural historian to chew over. Director Matthew Jones offers fascinating snapshots of the last golden age of underground music and the final flowering of British youth culture.

Lavelle started Mo’Wax records in 1992 when he was a motormouthed, hip-hop obsessed 18-year-old. As the digital tsunami was still a few years away, this was a time when a young entrepreneur could still marry his financial ambitions with his passion and creativity.

Early footage shows the passionate Lavelle sign up musicians and artists to define a cultural movement from a ramshackle office in London’s Caledonian Road.

So where are the current generation’s Lavelles? Probably on YouTube, videoing themselves playing Minecraft.

ACTION POINT ★★ (Cert 15, 85mins)

Johnny Knoxville is getting a bit long in the tooth for the daredevil DIY stunts of Jackass. So the 47-year-old has let his screenwriters do the heavy lifting here.

In this middling comedy, he plays DC, the owner of a highly dangerous theme park who is trying to bond with his estranged teenage daughter (Eleanor Worthington-Cox).

The story is set in the salad days of 1979, when apparently health and safety regulations didn’t run to putting a drunken grizzly bear in a petting zoo and fi ring children down a log flume with a fi reman’s hose.

Fellow Jackass alumnus Chris Pontius gets some amusing lines as his history-loving partner and Knoxville gamely takes part in some of the stunts himself. But if you can remember the pair’s MTV heyday, these attractions will seem tame.