Mr. Nice

Howard Marks (Rhys Ifans) grew up in a Welsh village, went to Oxford a relative innocent, and emerged from university as a fully-fledged drug smuggler. He subsequently went on to become one of Britain's most celebrated (notorious?) drug barons, leading an exuberant lifestyle while successfully evading most attempts at capture. Bernard Rose's biopic encourages us to admire Rose's chutzpah, as he encounters a variety of shady characters, including practicing IRA member Jim McCann (David Thewlis, speaking in an eccentric Irish accent), and American cartel owner Ernie Combs (Crispin Glover). The film's tone remains lighthearted throughout, and there are some convincing scenes where modern-day actors are inserted into authentically Seventies archive scenes (complete with washed-out colors). But in truth MR. NICE does not have that much to say, either about the ethics - if there can be such a thing - of drug-smuggling, nor about the lengths to which people will go to try and evade customs-officers of various countries. It remains a rather slight crime-caper, distinguished mostly by Ifans' jaunty performance as Howard Marks.

Howard Marks' biography remains one of the more fascinating and erudite, and just plain gobsmaking pieces of the past 20 years. He captured the zeitgeist and his book is full of bathos, bravado, and even some pathos.

The film does not capture this well. Shot in a very linear fashion we get a A-Z account of the life, but it suffers from that film biography sickness of making the events govern - and though we get those events quite frankly it gets pretty dull pretty quickly.

Given the talent here they should have gone for laughs, and though there are some, they are few and far between. What we have ended up with is a mediocre drama about the relationship between the IRA and a drug dealer - and honestly, even though it is viewable, it's not exactly brilliant.

If drugs are your thing I guess you may enjoy it. I was hoping for something less brash, less linear, and just more. The fault lies mainly in the script, the script is just not picking the superb moments that would have lifted this to another level, and is way too "and then this happens."

Given the material this could have been an excellent film, it's just OK.

The Pitch: Howard The Skunk.

The Review: I spent four years at University in Bath, getting a degree and starting to develop my love of movies. While I was there, I came into contact with two things for the first time in my life: drugs, and the Welsh. Not a combination that I, or indeed anyone else, would necessarily put together, but that combination was responsible for one of the biggest drug trafficking rings ever seen in this country, or indeed any other. That Welshness was contributed fairly effectively by one man, Howard Marks, described by the Daily Mail as "the most sophisticated drugs baron of all time." Not that you'd know that from watching Mr. Nice. Rhys Ifans comes across as a fairly reasonable approximation of the man himself, and this is the story of his passage from the small coal-mining village where he grew up to Oxford, and the pronounced influence that had on his future direction. Despite becoming a big fan of recreational drugs, if Mr. Nice is to be believed Marks fell into his career almost by accident, just happening to be in either the right or wrong place at the appropriate time. Slowly but surely, he expands his influence and his reach, and every time an opportunity comes up, he takes it.

In order to get what he needs, he begins to rope in a motley crew of accomplices, and ends up getting involved with the IRA (a manic David Thewlis) and eventually even expands into the Americas (via a bearded Crispin Glover), despite the protestations of his wife (Chloe Sevigny), seemingly the only person who can appreciate the potential cost of the risks that Howard's taking. Through the course of this, don't expect deep insights into why Marks is doing what he's doing, or passionate arguments for the legalisation of recreational drugs – those are only implied in the sense that this really isn't Trainspotting, and the downsides of Howard's habits are the run-ins with the law that he had, not from what he or any others ended up taking.

But freed from the weight of those expectations, this is an enjoyable romp. Bernard Rose has both adapted the screenplay and directed – his direction is unshowy, but there are little stylised touches (inserting Ifans into stock historical footage) and the occasional impressive image, but by and large he lets the story do the talking. Thewlis probably gets to have the most fun, raging around with his accent, while the only slight weak link is Sevigny, the accent wavering just occasionally and the performance also slightly shaky. There's nothing shaky about anyone else, though, they're all too tripped out on the material, so just sit back, revel in the absurdities of the story (all true, as long as you believe Marks), and have a good time, man.

Why see it at the cinema: There's a few shots, such as a car crash, that will benefit from the big screen, but by and large you'd be here more for the company than the impact of the visuals.

The Score: 7/10

Nothing really serious, this just tries to entertain you. And it does achieve it most of the time. The acting is really good. Though I'm not sure if this is really based on anything that really happened (and if so, how accurate it did handle it).

The humor is not to everyones taste and there is a weird mixture with drama and adult themes going on. The UK rating still seemed a bit too high for my taste (no pun intended). It must have been the themes it did touch I guess. The story has bumps here and there, that do not allow you to be completely on top of it. Still despite those flaws, there is much fun to be had, with the rest of it.

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.