Elba is at his magnetic best in this fantastic documentary: challenging racist myths, comforting victims’ families and packing in more nuance than you’d think possible. He’s like a supernatural force
The director Guillermo del Toro once said Idris Elba has “a supernatural gravitational force” and compared him to a “Rodin sculpture … [with] all the turmoil of humanity in his eyes”. It is those qualities – being a magnetic TV and movie star and an activist seemingly carrying the burden of the world on his shoulders – that makes him so compelling in Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis.
The BBC documentary follows Elba throughout 2024, as he mounts a campaign to try to stop knife crime in the UK. The headlines have long been filled with tragic stories of young lives ended by blades, but in the past decade the numbers have almost doubled, with four people in the UK dying from stab wounds every week. Elba first got involved in 2019, posting videos online about how more had to be done to stop it. Since then, he has become more informed and more involved. We watch him meet politicians, law enforcement officers, victims, prisoners, youth workers and trauma specialists to figure out a proactive – rather than reactive – approach, and carry out interventions in the lives of those who might one day become perpetrators.
