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.
