Mr Nice

Howard Marks. Celebrity dope smuggler. Moved an awful lot of hashish from Afghanistan in his time, and eventually served a bit of time for doing so. Apparently went straight-ish after that, and instead made a bit of money writing a bestselling book about his exploits, and then, presumably, even more money by selling the film rights. Hence this.

Rhys Ifans plays Marks throughout his life, which is the first amusingly odd bit, since it starts with him aged about 15, getting bullied at school, and there's no sense in which he looks anything other than 6'2, and 42 years old. He's a clever lad, gets into Oxford, and ends up falling in with some guys who smoke a lot of pot, a pastime which he clearly finds quite diverting. There's a brief dalliance with a normal life after university, until he gets persuaded to move a large quantity of hashish resin which a mate of his has stashed in a car's innards in Germany, and which needs to get to London. The fact that his mate can't do it himself because he's in prison doesn't seem to daunt him any. One successful smuggling operation, and he's hooked, setting up front businesses, making contacts in the IRA to use their gun smuggling channels to move drugs, and so forth, until the inevitable point where the authorities catch up with him, and the multi-million selling book and screenplay tell us that crime doesn't pay.

It's a little bit of a flawed film, because it doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a comedy or not. There's the odd bout of larks and hijinks, and some comedy turns from the likes of David Thewlis, as a pretty hapless IRA contact, but in the end, we're kind of being sold a bill of goods which says that Marks got himself into some unbelievable scrapes, but in the end, what Marks did was find a contact to supply him the stuff, and then arranged for it to be brought in through an Irish airport, and cunningly avoiding police attention by just not really touching the stuff himself. Hardly swaggering swashbuckling smuggler stuff. I think the meaning of the title pretty much sums up the general anticlimax of the plot. "Mr Nice", you think. "I wonder how an underworld figure gets the nickname 'Mr Nice.' I bet there's all kinds of stories of his benevolent robinhoodery behind that!" What happened was - he was on the run from the police, needed a new identity, so stole the identity of a bloke who happened to be called "Donald Nice". Oh. Is that it then? And there's an overall sense of "Is that it then?" that permeates the whole film.

Performance wise, Rhys Ifans is the only one really asked to put in a performance, with everyone else just being walk on extras in Marks' life. And he does a pretty sterling job. It hardly seems a stretch from his usual screen Welshman persona to what he presents as Marks, but it's when the wheels start coming off stuff, and he finally starts having to pay for his crimes, that there's a real pathos to him. The message of the film is that Marks really does feel that he didn't do anything wrong, even if it was illegal. To him, cannabis is a beneficial herb, and he's as much an enthusiastic consumer as anyone he ever sold it to. And we see him pay a hefty price for a crime that, in the estimation of the narrator and the film-makers, hurts no-one. I suspect your opinion on that will depend on your views on cannabis, and your views on obedience to laws you don't agree with.

The film looks pretty good; beyond the obvious problem that the film covers about 30 years of Marks' life, and Ifans pretty much looks as old as he does at the end of that time, throughout the whole movie. The timeline of the movie is shown through the film stock; we start off on old black and white film for his childhood, which bleeds into colour on his first experience with cannabis, and then stays in vintage grainy colour stock throughout the sixties and seventies, getting towards more modern film effects towards the end. It's a neat biographical trick.

Ultimately, though, by the end of the film, I felt that Marks' point had been put across, to which I sort of mentally nodded and thought "fair enough then" and went on with my day. I'd been mildly entertained, and slightly informed, but I didn't think that it had made any real connection.