First and foremost, if you haven't read the book or seen the film. Then please read the book first. Then if you want to afterwards, watch the film. Now I fully appreciate that novels, films, plays etc are all different forms of art and ways of telling stories, and people shouldn't always compare a film to the original book so harshly as most do. But immediately two books spring to mind that the writer of the novel has done a fantastic job, and so has the film in adapting it, I speak of, 'No Country for Old Men' and 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowards Robert Ford'. However, with 'Mr. Nice', the book is greatly written, it is funny, witty, heartwarming and a general entertaining easy read which is fantastic coming from such an intelligent man who doesn't have to prove himself by filling the novel with big clever words. But what he does do is fill it will the entirety of his life that makes for a fun and interesting read, that creates characters in your head you can picture so well and understand, and even at the end of wish you could of been apart of his life (for the good times anyway). Now the best way to describe what Bernard Rose did to the book to make the film was simply pick it up, and flick through it all in the that quick motion we can do with our thumb, letting the pages slide by and fan us as it goes. This is what the film felt like to me. It had no structure in terms of story to it, just episodes of the book he could pick out with his eyes as the pages flew past him and then shot it, and in the editing room tried to string them together to get some sort of story out it. Even if I hadn't read the book before and knew all that Rose had left out, I still wouldn't have connected with any of the characters on the screen or the story itself. You may say that a four hundred page book is difficult to squeeze into a two hour film, and that is fair enough, but I ask you to only look towards what Jackson and Walsh did for the LOTR. This then leads me to believe that Rose has no real writing skills and doesn't really no what a story is. Nor editing for that matter. But what annoyed me the most I think for this film is the total lack of knowledge towards the characters he was portraying on the film, now I may have read the book differently, and this is just my opinion, but I don't feel any of the characters were captured at all on the screen, especially Jim McCann, and every scene never went anywhere or made me feel anything towards them or the connection they should have with another. Like I said before, it just felt like Rose had took bits of the book out and tried stringing them together, giving us no real story or character arc. The only saving grace for this film for me was the fact that Rose remembered to put in a few of the good bits from the book itself, such as the funny scene in both book and film of when McCann and Marks are trying to talk to each other over the radio.
