Educations come in all shapes and sizes. You can go the average “American Dream” route, go to high school, a nice college and then get a high-paying job. Or maybe you go to a technical school and start a small business. There’s always the journeyman route where you scour the globe looking for any experience you can get. Of course, none of these paths are necessarily mutually exclusive, nor are they the only choices, and perhaps the best real-life illustration of this fact is the notorious British drug smuggler Howard Marks. He went from a scholar to a drug dealer to a British spy and eventually a convicted felon, but in the course of it all he saw the world, wined and dined with powerful men on both sides of the law, and had one hell of a time doing it. Mr. Nice tells Marks’s story from his humble beginnings all the way to the end, and it does so with a terrific cast led by Rhys Ifans and rounded out by the likes of David Thewlis, Chloe Sevigny, Elsa Pataky, Crispin Glover and more.
As film portrayals of famous drug dealers go, the approaches to their characterization are as different as the drugs they peddle. Rhys Ifans goes about the film with a contagious joy that makes him impossible not to cheer for, bouncing from one exotic locale to the next between stops in England. This isn’t the story of a brilliant drug kingpin, seemingly omniscient with henchmen guarding a huge compound; it’s the story of a guy falling further and further into a business only to discover he’s quite good at it.
While the performances from Ifans, Thewlis and the like are excellent, the pacing moves in stops and starts as it attempts to weigh the interesting story of his career as a smuggler and spy against the deflated pseudo-love story that it skirts every now and then. Mr. Nice is beautifully lensed and shifts between aesthetics as easily as Marks does countries, but the flash paired with performances only partially redeem the film in some of its painfully slow and off-track moments.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
There’s not as much here as an enjoyable biopic as Mr. Nice would warrant, but the barebones “making of” piece is worth the brief time it takes to watch it. A trailer for the film is also included.
"Mr. Nice" is on sale October 11, 2011 and is not rated. Biopic, Comedy, Drama. Written and directed by Bernard Rose. Starring Chloe Sevigny, Crispin Glover, David Thewlis, Elsa Pataky, Rhys Ifans.
