Bernard Rose’s (Candyman, Immortal Beloved) Mr. Nice is a biopic of the infamous Welsh hashish smuggler Dennis Howard Marks. Oxford educated, Marks didn’t set out to be a drug kingpin, but he didn’t fall into a life of crime by accident, either: once he saw how much money a friend was making running hashish back and forth across Europe, he could hardly stop thinking about it. It’s Marks’ moral ambivalence that makes his story particularly interesting.
The film begins with an aged Marks (Rhys Ifans) on a stage asking “are there any plainclothes policemen in the crowd tonight?” before telling his story, the film covers Marks’ years as a bullied teen to his days at Oxford as a brilliant student and drug enthusiast to his adult life as a high powered drug dealer. While Marks’ moral ambivalence is obvious, the film places little importance Marks’ life, no moral or ideological weight to his tale, which comes off as lazy, considering the fact that Marks is brilliant, a best-selling author and one of the most well-respected proponents of the legalization of marijuana currently living in England.
A sheltered boy from the small town of Kenfig Hill, Wales, Howard was given a shot at the brass ring when he was given a scholarship to Oxford. Upon his arrival, Howard’s sheltered worldview clashes with the rampant hippie culture of the sixties: free-love, free flowing prose and lots of hash. Howard immediately takes to the drug, and he finds that post college teaching jobs, even for Oxford graduates, hardly allows for a comfortable life in very expensive London. He gets a chance to make some real money when his dealer, temporarily held up by an arrest, asks Marks to step in and fill his shoes on an international smuggling jaunt, and then market the huge quantity of high-quality pot, which Marks proves to have a talent for.
Taking a free-love stoner named Judy (Chloë Sevigny) as his main squeeze, Howard ditches his job as a teacher and becomes the point man for hash distribution in Ireland, Britain and, eventually, America, with major connections in Lebanon and Mexico. Managing to evade capture, he becomes a father, makes a lot of good decisions and a few terrible ones but it’s all stuff we’ve seen in other films about criminals, from Goodfellas to Carlos. Unfortunately, those films, among others, do it better. Where Mr. Nice succeeds is in depicting the difficult relationship between Marks and his contacts in other countries. The most notable of these characters is Jim McCann (David Thewlis), a porn-addicted, paranoid IRA middleman. Let me just say to all directors: use David Thewlis as much as possible. The guy constantly turns in interesting performances.
Rhys Ifans’ portrayal of Howard Marks is the finest of his career thus far. He does a fine job conveying the charming intellectualism that made him so appealing to Britons. Unfortunately, Bernard Rose tries to cover too much material in two hours. In order to fit everything in, he skims over some events that need to be explored and expands on other things that don’t matter as much. As a result, we aren’t able to get a real sense of his daily life. Nor do we really understand the importance of his role in modern drug history. The film features fine supporting performances from Crispin Glover, Omid Djalili, Jack Huston and Luis Tosar, but it’s a shame they weren’t given stronger material to work with.
Presented in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the 1080p transfer of Mr. Nice is an impressive one. The colors are sharp and vivid—ranging from black-and-white to a rather muted color palette. There are no digital anomalies to speak of, and contrast is nice.
Both audio options—DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and uncompressed PCM 2.0—are top shelf and offer equal clarity, fullness, and depth of sound, the major difference between the two is a closer concentration of sound with the PCM and a wider dispersal but slight spreading/thinning-out of the audio on the DTS.
Special features are limited:
- Making of Featurette (13 mins.) Standard stuff, with raw footage from the shooting of the film in Spain and Wales.
- Theatrical Trailer (3 mins.)
