One Love

Once upon a time writer Trevor Rhone shrewdly situated the Robin Hood-style folk hero in Jamaica’s reggae biz in ‘The Harder They Come’. Here – as the title suggests – he uses the same milieu for the Romeo-and-Juliet romance between easy-going Rastafarian muso Kassa (Ky-mani Marley, son of Bob) and Serena (Cherine Anderson), a clean-living Christian chorister engaged, at the insistence of her pastor dad, to a guy less strait-laced than he looks. Then there’s also the little problem of greedy record-exec gangstas… As polished and predictably feelgood as one expects from folk with ‘Smile Orange’ and ‘Dancehall Queen’ on their CVs, this ambles amiably along till the lovers’ personal and professional liberty comes under violent threat: an influx of drama in a narrative otherwise serving mainly as a peg for the music. As impossible to dislike as it is to get excited about, it’s efficient, old-fashioned entertainment, so utterly conventional that a £900,000 input from the Film Council’s New Cinema fund is – or ought to be – unfathomable.