Mr. Nice

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

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.

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.

Mr Nice is a rare beast of a film, it swaggers, it spits, it dreams, it punches, it laughs, it cries and of course and likely above all it gets stoned.

Howard Marks is the central character played effortlessly by Rhys Ifans, a welsh school boy turned big city student and pothead. We see Marks transformation through a series of off beat scenes in which director Bernard Rose reflects on Marks' humble, banal yet honest origins. Then our protagonist through a combination youthful substance experimentation and a fateful convergence of circumstances is established as an international Drug smuggler,

We are gradually introduced to a plethora of interesting characters that vary from casual love interests to drug dealing allies, who materialise as Ifans travels deeper into Marks' world of dope, dealing and debauchery. Amongst the group are fine supporting efforts notably from David Thewlis who delivers the hilariously cranky IRA terrorist turned middle man Jim. Chloë Sevigny convinces as the overly supportive wife and mother Judy and Omid Djalili sparkles intermittently as the Pakistani pusher Saleem Malik.

The film takes us through the tumultuous times of sex, drugs, betrayal, greed, prison and pot which Marks and his merry men navigate their way through against a lush backdrop of 70's pastiche. By the time we get to the stories conclusion we have great connections with the characters motives as a result of the superb cast and due to an impressive directorial mesh of humour and grit from Rose what's left is the best British film of the year to date.

8/10

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.