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Akilla's Escape has smarts and streetsmarts in equal measure

Well-crafted tale anchored by two great performances - from the same actor

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Many a young actor delivers a powerhouse role that has critics wondering what they’ll see them in next. Thamela Mpumlwana gives us two in the same film in Akilla’s Escape.

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In one, he plays young Akilla Brown, growing up in 1990s Jamaica and then New York, tutored by his streetwise but mercurial father (Ronnie Rowe Jr.), and eventually following him into the illegal drug trade.

Akilla is played as adult in present-day Toronto by Saul Williams. He’s a calm, laidback dude, but also clearly not a man to be trifled with. When a colleague casually uses the N-word on someone, Akilla makes him answer for it.

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Akilla’s world is shaken when a group of men break into his dispensary, making off with money and product, and killing a man in the process. The thieves also leave behind one of their young accomplices, a boy named Sheppard who’s been forced into working for them.

Akilla sees something of himself in the lad, and no wonder. It’s Mpumlwana again, but delivering such a different performance that it took me until the end credits to be certain he was not two actors. Whereas young Akilla has the poise and swagger of a young Don Cheadle, Sheppard is awkward and uncertain. (He’s also high on something forced on him by the other gang members.)

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Jamaican-Canadian filmmaker Charles Officer (Nurse. Fighter. Boy, and the recent documentary Unarmed Verses) co-wrote and directed this crime drama, which seems simple until you realize that it’s operating on two levels at once, each anchored by one of Mpumlwana’s characters. What at first appears to be mere flashbacks to Akilla’s formative years gradual takes on the heft and structure of a separate storyline, one that both informs but also reflects the present-day plot.

Akilla’s Escape recently won four Canadian screen awards, including for its screenplay, and received nominations for actors Williams, Rowe and Mpumlwana, though I’d argue he deserved two noms. It features some excellent performers in minor roles, including Colm Feore as a marijuana farmer, and Donisha Prendergast as Sheppard’s caregiver and aunt. (You can also see her in the four-minute short Black Bodies, which screens alongside this feature.)

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Officer makes the most of his Toronto locations, including a scene set at Wexford Heights Plaza, a Scarborough strip mall that was also the setting of one of my favourite Canadian films of 2017, Wexford Plaza. He plays with our expectations about characters, as when one tough guy named Jimmy brings Akilla to see “the Greek,” who is not quite what I expected.

Finally, he has crafted a tightly woven, intricate screenplay, smart without being showy. His characters are familiar with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the myth of Achilles, but they do more than just mouth the words. “I’m thinking of evolution,” says adult Akilla in one of the film’s best, most thought-provoking lines. “How it favours the adaptable. Not the strong.”

Akilla’s Escape is available June 15 on demand at digital.tiff.net and elsewhere.

4 stars out of 5

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