Mr. Nice

[EthanRunt]

Another annoyingly dull and pretty appalling biopic about a person deserving no sympathy (like Bronson)
The cast were either dull or, like Chloe Sevigny, severly mis-cast, and the film tried to be Goodfellas meets Trainspoting, but is just a grubby mess of dull biography and generic drug dealing film. And the green screening of actors onto stock footage? I wanted to punch the director in the face, it never looked good or worked, just took me out of an already really really bad movie.

I fear for British Cinema if this is the kind of crap that gets funding, I really do. 1/10

[Celini]

funny how you felt the exact opposite of what I felt!

[Beate]

I didn't like it very much at all. I think it was pointless and boring, and what was it meant to achieve? Glorify a drugs dealer? He can be played by Rhys Ifans as a loving family father as much as he wants, he remains a criminal. The film also never troubled us with a timeline I could understand or dealings that made sense. I also disliked all the grainy footage from the 70s and really can't understand why this guy is kind of a folk hero. He had the undeserved luck of being acquitted of drug dealing twice, and even started an honest business, only to start wrecking lives again because he "felt bored". Unbelievable.

Vue Islington was very full.

5/10

[Celini]

very full indeed, we arrived 10 minutes before the start and had to go with the bottom row (glad it was not the first row!)

[Beate]

Yeah we saw people arriving and looking around for seats. Unfortunately no one came all the way to the top or I could have told them there were about 4 seats left in the back row! Not much else though.

[ejwrank]

Thought this was too long and for the most part dull. Surely there are better people to make a film about than Howard Marks. I had pretty low expectations and these were fulfilled by a mediocre film.

[opas]

I agree that is was a fairly dull film and far too long. Hard to feel any sympathy for him, he had his chances but got too greedy - although it was justified as boredom. I don't think the story was particularly well told, there were points where I didn't follow what was going on, it just seemed to jump in places.

And like EthanRunt, the whole green screen thing onto old images of London and elsewhere really annoyed me (not sure I wanted to punch the director in the face, but I do think Ethan would have been justified). It was so poorly done. I love seeing how London looked in the past as I'm familiar with many of those streets today. Seeing the images of Bank and Oxford Circus were great - what wasn't great was seeing what appeared to be a cut out of Ifans swanning across like he was meant to be there. Whoever did those scenes for the film should have been replaced - I thought it was shockingly bad - and if that was the look they were going for well I'd advise that they try harder!

There was a lot of movement in terms of people coming and going in Greenwich. Quite a few latecomers but it also looked like some people left half way through! Don't think it was that bad.

5/10 - wouldn't wasted too much time and effort trying to catch this but it is not absolutely awful.

[midian]

i thought that the whole film was supposed to be tongue in cheek and the green screen deliberately bad in that ed wood spoofish kind of way. i thought it was overall very funny. incongruously light for such a hard and horrid topic. i think i may even read the original bio.

i get it that he was a loveable rogue. nice bloke can't stop doing bad things. i had a friend like that once. he just loved a con. and when he finally conned me for a few hundred i had to shake his hand and laugh; he'd got me with my eyes wide open. i guess i am one of those who would have shook HM's hand when he got off with that preposterous lie in the court. [shrugs].

and the smoking scenes. wow. i thought they were very sensual. i [almost] want to learn to smoke!

7/10 for me.

[Iloveholidays]

We saw this film at Romford tonight and thought it was tedious and uninteresting and I agree with Beate, totally pointless. For us, it got off to a really bad start when Rhys Ifans played Howard Marks as a schoolboy - totally unbelievable, as were the rest of the main characters throughout the whole movie. Having lived through the era, I can only say that I found it to be unrealistic rubbish that made light of both drug taking/dealing and the IRA, whose bombings/killings/maimings were the scourge of that time. I give it 2/10 for the old footage.

[stuartboy]

Oh dear. I was coming on here to say nice things about the film. Looks like I am in a minority of one - lol - so maybe I'll stay quiet! Maybe it was that I was sat in the front row with my nose touching the screen, but I really didn't notice the poor use of green screening. I actually thought the old footage made scenes look more realistic. I guess also being a biopic they were rather limited in the storyline. I'd give this film 7/10 and so much better than the dull effort that was The Runaways.