The Harder They Come review – Jimmy Cliff falls hard in visceral revenge western

Gallery: The 25 best Gen-X films (Yardbarker)Ivan is humiliated and traumatised by corporal punishment handed down by the courts for a first offence, eight strokes of the tamarind switch – a horribly explicit scene. He then goes on a violent cop-killing rampage to promote his single, which duly becomes a massive hit and he sends photos of himself in cowboy-gunslinger poses to the papers.

As the army closes in, Ivan has a new plan, to escape by boat to Cuba, where they will appreciate his radical outlaw vocation: “Revolutionary to Ras …”The reggae soundtrack throbs and crunches and shudders in concert with the raw energy of Henzell’s storytelling and Cliff’s performance, but this doesn’t preclude a shrewdly self-aware debate about representation. At one point Hilton demands to know from Jones if they are banning Ivan’s single.

His reply is: “Yes, if it glorifies crime. ” Hilton responds: “Banning it from the hit parade? That’s when you make the guy into a big deal.

” Of course, it is in Hilton’s interests for Ivan to be a big deal, although unlike the American papers who published what Bonnie and Clyde sent them, the Jamaican press is far more obedient. When pious Christian Elsa tells her big-talking boyfriend that he is a “dreamer”, Ivan snaps back: “Who’s a bigger dreamer than you? Always talking about milk and honey in the sky.

Well, no milk and honey in the sky! No, not for you, not for me. It’s right down here, and I want mine now, tonight!” Ivan may not be an existential hero, but he knows he is going to die in the very near future, and this conviction accelerates his celebrity and his fanatical devotion to the swiftly dwindling present moment of defiant self-awareness: he daubs graffiti all over town proclaiming