Mr Nice

The land that produced Lloyd George, Anthony Hopkins and a lot of good singers has used its local film promotion budget to present PR-savvy drug-dealing ex-con Howard Marks as an awfully nice chap. Not even Welshman Rhys Ifan in the title role can achieve such a mission impossible. There is no way that such an anti-hero can have lived up to his stolen identity as Mr Nice.

Writer-director Bernard Rose, best known for his multi-awarded 1992 Candyman, adapted Marks' best-selling autobiography and did his own (unexceptional) cinematography. As the man is still alive, Rose obviously couldn't employ any writer's licence to make Marks' stories ring truer. He was apparently a gifted Welsh lad who won an Oxford scholarship, was a typical grass-smoking student, and became an overnight marijuana kingpin with an ill-defined second wife (Chloe Sevigny), smuggling pals in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a simple-minded link (Crispin Glover) in the USA.

Eventually trapped and convicted there, Marks was given an astonishing early release maybe because he was in secret partnership with an IRA gun-and-drug-running madman. David Thewlis emotes wildly as Jim McCann, whose end fate is not made clear in the film or reality, and will eventually inspire a biopic no Sinn Fein politician would want any Irish movie promotion outfit to fund. He's 72 and last heard of, according to Wikipedia, as an official 2002 Republic of Belarus delegate to a climate change convention.

Marks ended up back in the UK as a touring one-man chat show, apparently revered by toking students. It is never indicated why Marks, self-confessedly at the top of his world for almost a decade, failed to attract the thieving attention of real murderous gangsters in London, South Asia or the States. Did fear of the Provisional IRA extend that far? An outsider can only suspect that there's a lot more to Marks' life story than he chose to divulge semi-comically: his screen character's shallow facade is therefore ideally personified by Ifans, always a slouchy actor without depth. Likable but louche.