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Review
100 Streets review: Idris Elba's celebrity can't save this aimless Altman-esque drama
Director: Jim O’Hanlon; Starring: Idris Elba, Gemma Arterton, Franz Drameh, Charlie Creed-Miles, Kierston Wareing, Tom Cullen, Ken Stott. 15 cert, 93 mins.
The oldest thing in London, according to the poet Cicely Fox Smith, is the River Thames – the gurgling, grey-brown constancy of which she hymned in verse written, it’s thought, during the First World War. The poem’s opening couplet – “A thousand landmarks perish, / A hundred streets grow strange” – is the source of this present-day ensemble drama’s magpie-pinched title.
Although what a plaintive wartime rumination on the impermanence of human endeavour has to do with a film whose most enduring image is Ken Stott practising Tai Chi under Battersea Bridge with a pair of Beats By Dre headphones clamped over his ears is anybody’s guess.
But then, guesswork is a process you’ll return to time and again during seasoned TV director Jim O’Hanlon’s debut feature – not least because it’s never entirely clear why its three unrelated stories are being told in the first place. In an opening voiceover, young drug dealer Kingsley (Franz Drameh) explains that entire lives are defined by single choices.
While that observation relates sharply to his own tough circumstances – is pursuing his dream of acting with his unlikely mentor (Stott) worth the risk of life-threatening reprisals from his gang? – it doesn’t meaningfully apply to either of the two other plotlines in Leon Butler’s underpowered screenplay.
In fact, both seem to actively refute it. The second, about a guileless cab driver (Charlie Creed-Miles) hoping to adopt with his wife (Kierston Wareing) hinges on dumb bad luck, while the other, in which an ex-England rugby captain (Idris Elba) attempts to reconcile with his semi-estranged WAG (Gemma Arterton), entails a never-ending series of small choices on Elba’s character’s part, some smart, others witlessly self-destructive.
Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.
The most successful thread is the Elba-Arterton one: they’re playing celebrities, and both actors come bathed in a celebrity-like glow of easy watchability that makes their story’s clumsier moments easier to forgive. Max (Elba) is in the doghouse after his affair with his children’s nanny became a tabloid scandal, while his wife Emily (Arterton) contemplates returning to the stage after a 12-year child-rearing absence: hurdles en route to the restoration of harmony include a revenge affair with a hunky photographer (her) and cocaine-fuelled meltdowns in public (him).
The adoption story is harder to weather, with Creed-Miles mugging though milk-bottle specs and Wareing squandered as the despairing-but-supportive wife who steers him through the aftermath of a galling tragedy. In the film’s rush to get through things, it shuffles between its storylines with soap-opera fickleness, and the strategy proves most damaging here, with narrative gaps so perilous you could twist an ankle in them.
As for the drug-dealing tale, you’ve seen it all before – though the terrific Drameh (who alongside Star Wars’ John Boyega was one of the bright young discoveries of Joe Cornish’s 2011 council-estate sci-fi romp Attack the Block) makes each of his scenes feel crisp and considered. His inter-generational bromance with Stott’s honey-glazed ham doesn’t ring true for a second, but that’s because – like almost everything interesting here – a second is about all you get of it.