Mr Nice: The Verdict

Sealed with a handshake at a Super Furry Animals gig, Rhys Ifans has always been Howard Marks’ choice to portray himself on the silver screen. Sadly, it’s just about the only good decision the filmmaker made in this oddly charmless movie. Telling the tale of the UK’s most famous (and infamous) hashish smuggler was never going to be easy. The labyrinthine story of Marks’ life, loves, aliases and drug deals is complicated to say the least. To cram the whole lot into 120 minutes is quite a task. And one which the director, Bernard Rose, isn’t quite up to.

Breezing through his early forays in academia at Oxford, the raffish charm of the real Howard Marks is only hinted it. His schmoozing and networking in the corridors and halls of Balliol were the basis of many of his later escapades but here, sadly, thanks to the constraints of time they are glossed over with a marijuana-tinged haziness which fails to explain how quickly and seamlessly the titular anti-hero found himself at the centre of his own smuggling empire.

Moving through history as the film does, backdrops are hazy and semi-formed. Presumably this device was designed to add an air of ambiguous fuzziness to proceedings (is Marks’ own account entirely believable or just fogged by his chain smoking of dope?). Sadly, the effect ends up looking half finished and cheap – like the film was shot on the cheap with no budget for real locations.

Thankfully, Ifans gives an excellent performance as Marks. His lugubrious Kenfig Hill accent is pitch perfect and he’s clearly spent quite some time practising the inhalation of reefer smoke. If only Chloe Sevigny had devoted such care to perfecting her English accent. Other characters are reduced to little more than colourful cameos, giving little sense of the importance they played in the real-life adventures of Mr Nice. The exception to this is David Thewlis - he’s outstanding as Jim McCann, a porn-obsessed IRA man who steals every scene he appears in.

The scale of Marks’ deception and the inventiveness of his scamming and dealing is barely hinted at in a plot which becomes hard to follow thanks largely to its own simplicity. That might sound counterintuitive, but a little background goes a long way in terms of understanding the machinations which saw Marks importing and exporting drugs from countries including Germany, London, Ireland, Pakistan, Amsterdam, Thailand, Spain and America whilst using 43 aliases on 89 different phonelines. Perhaps a tighter focus on one of his individual deals might have helped an audience’s understanding of how the whole thing went down. Instead, Mexican DEA agents appear inexplicably to help him out of the dock and the supporting cast are left half-formed and unfinished.

A prior knowledge of the Mr Nice story would certainly help in filling the glaring gaps in the plot, but unfortunately the lack of urgency in the pace of the film gives a sense of a man gently frittering his life away on disastrous dope deals when the reality was far more exciting and enticing. The moral ambiguity of a man dealing what he considers ‘beneficial herbs’ is barely explored either, leaving a feeling that a truly in-depth analysis of the Welshman might have been better explored as a TV series.