When you ask a friend what somebody is like, and she tells you that person is “nice,” you can reasonably infer that the person is either kind of boring and/or there is very little to say about them. It is similarly the case that I have very little to say about director Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice. It is the true story of Howard Marks, pseudonym Mr. Nice (Rhys Ifans), a Welsh Oxford grad from humble origins who goes from discovering that he likes smoking marijuana as a student in the 1960s to becoming one of the most notorious international cannabis dealers of the last half century. While this makes for undeniably exciting content, the film itself putters along at an ill-considered pace, denying us both narrative tension and any real psychological insight into Marks.
Just as that friend might insist to you, “no, I really mean, he/she is a genuinely nice person,” the film follows through on that score, too. It is the nicest drug movie I’ve ever seen. If you’ve grown up on the Godfather, Scarface, or American Gangster, you expect a drug kingpin to have some major personality issues or a slightly itchy trigger finger. Not Marks, who was about to become a regular schoolteacher when he was called up to perform his first drug errand, picking up the pieces for a friend who got caught trying to run hashish back from Germany. After that point, Mr. Nice’s career as a drug dealer is marked by a definite avoidance of violence and a full-hearted, joyful endorsement of the product he peddles.
We do get a tiny glimpse into Marks when he describes the rush he gets on his first drug smuggling run as a kind of orgasm, but beyond that, he and his wife Judy (Chloë Sevigny) are impish, smartly dressed, and completely devoid of compelling inner conflicts. Rhys Ifans is perfectly cast as the savvy and happy-go-lucky protagonist, but Chloë Sevigny has very little to do other than look worried and pop out a new baby what seems like every 10 minutes. The film is a hazy, wild ride of drug trafficking antics involving a salty IRA personality, the British secret intelligence service, major perjury, and transatlantic drug shipments via touring rock bands’ speakers. Still, when Marks gets caught, gets away, and gets caught again, one just doesn’t care. The movie is not un-enjoyable, but like the drug it promotes, it might be best consumed on a lazy, hungover afternoon.
