Mr. Nice

I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I honestly did not expect that I would enjoy it after having read the book.

Last year I read Joseph D Pistone's "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life In The Mafia" and watched the film immediately afterwards and I felt the film paled in comparison to the book. Therefore after I had read "Mr Nice" and knew there was a film adaptation I felt it would be as big a disappointment as Donnie Brasco.

On this basis I left it a couple of months after reading the book before watching Mr Nice and as a result I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. When I put the DVD in and it starts off with Rhys Ifans in front of a crowd asking if anybody was a plains cloths officer I had my doubts about how the film would be portrayed but once the black and white prologue turned to colour I was gripped.

Obviously this is not a perfect account of Howard Mark's life as many people have said you can not translate a 600 page book into a 2 hour film without missing many parts out but I feel it was not so much a literal depiction of the book but rather a visual interpretation of Howard Mark's life using the book as a starting point. As others have mentioned it leaves out much of his life based in Hong Kong and Thailand and The Phillipines as well as the feeling of despair when confronted with being deported to the United States and even the fact the judge called the wrong outcome which is something a film would normally expand upon. Every actor in this film felt believable as the character they portray.

I enjoyed this film more than I ever expected to therefore I feel a rating of 7 is justified. However I do feel the need to criticise the few scenes that earned this film an 18 rating. Jim McCann getting his knob out and the tooth extraction scene near the end of the film felt unnecessary. Don't get me wrong I prefer films to have scenes which disgust but there is a place for that sort of thing and I did not feel this film warranted it. It could have reached a better audience had it skipped these scenes and had a 15 rating.

However I feel I may have rated this film higher than it deserves based on not being disappointed, which made me feel relieved.

Having watched this tonight i think i can offer a fair review , its a joke to indicate the film doesn't have grounding within the book , there just too alike for words , however the book contains long winded accounts of activity that are tedious and boring , thankfully these sections were omitted from the film , good news then ? well no , sadly also key points in Howard marks life are also not in the film , the result has sections that make no sense whatsoever to the layman , Howard appeared to move around without reason and know people without explanation , the consequences of others actions are also omitted leaving a disjointed and slightly sinister film , there is humour but its not of the lol sort , knowing the film was shot over just 2 months then i think it shows , Howard marks has led a life so rich and varied and yet it simply wasn't portrayed in this film to its fullest , it leaves you with an empty feeling in that the film felt like soup when it could so easily have been steak , Ifans could not have done a better job and the only lightweight in the cast would be Chloe sevigney who didn't have much to say and didn't display a passion in the role , over all the film IMO is worth of a 6.5/10

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.

A film that in theory couldn't go wrong with some of the stories Howard has got in his arsenal. But the film was slightly off aim; mainly by concentrating more on his family life than action packed drug deals or comedy situations. Lets face it, the reason everyone wants to read and now watch about Marks is not his loyalty as a husband or devotion as a father.

Director Bernard Rose just seemed to go the wrong way about telling the story of Mr Nice. With very dry arresting scenes which are better left played out in your head with Howard's narration or read in the book.The film does have its up points however with David Thewlis putting in a master class performance as crazy Irish IRA Jim McCann which left me half wanting the film to be all about him. Rhys Ifans played the part of Mr Nice with that particular Marks swagger which his fans know and love him for and pulls it off well.

The film has pockets of comedy which helps numb the slow two hours of product, but at times it doesn't seem to know what it is a good witty British film to an ITV drama.

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.