In repose, Rhys Ifans's face seems naturally to settle into a half-smile of insinuation: a "you-know-you-want-me" leer. It's probably entirely appropriate for his latest role – and really, no other casting was possible. He plays Howard Marks, the Oxford-educated Welshman who, chaotically and bizarrely, stumbled into the game of importing hashish from Pakistan to the UK in the early 70s, back in the days when this lucrative and unexplored market was still open to gentleman amateurs.
The movie is based on the tall tales in Marks's 1996 memoir Mr Nice. That title, taken from an alias he once assumed, cheerfully invites us to take seriously the idea that he is, indeed, Mr Nice, that the drugs he was importing were the nice, soft, hippyish ones – distinct from harder substances – and that he personally never did anything nasty, which makes him a very rare drug-smuggler indeed. (I can never see Mr Nice in the bookshops without thinking of a line from Doug Liman's 1999 movie Go, in which a character hears one possible source of drugs described as a "good guy" and replies sarcastically: "Oh, he's the good drug dealer!")
Bernard Rose, who has crafted brilliant Tolstoy modernisations in the shape of Ivansxtc and The Kreutzer Sonata, creates a fluent, watchable story, in which this lovable rogue is digitally inserted into period clips of 60s and 70s Oxford, London, Kabul and Karachi. Marks gets into dope at university and is asked by one of his dealing mates to drive a Mercedes stuffed with drugs from Germany to Britain. Soon, he finds that there's much more money in this than teaching and, through a radical-hippy journalist mate, gets a crucial contact in Jim McCann (David Thewlis), an IRA man who allows him to use the Provos' arms network to bring in the drugs. Chloë Sevigny plays his wife Judy – not a terribly interesting part – and Marks also finds that an old Oxford contemporary, played by Christian McKay, tries to recruit him to MI6, and offers to help out in exchange for information. (This recruitment scene, with official phone number discreetly and deniably scribbled on a beer mat, is eerily similar to the one in Michael Caton-Jones's 1989 film Scandal, in which saucer-eyed Stephen Ward is induced to tell the spooks about the politicians' bedroom shenanigans.) It all has, weirdly, a stranger-than-fiction ring of truth, and despite our antihero's Welshness, it is a very English tale of a bumbling drug empire built almost by accident. You have to take it with a pinch of salt: but it's entertaining.
