Howard Marks' biography remains one of the more fascinating and erudite, and just plain gobsmaking pieces of the past 20 years. He captured the zeitgeist and his book is full of bathos, bravado, and even some pathos.

The film does not capture this well. Shot in a very linear fashion we get a A-Z account of the life, but it suffers from that film biography sickness of making the events govern - and though we get those events quite frankly it gets pretty dull pretty quickly.

Given the talent here they should have gone for laughs, and though there are some, they are few and far between. What we have ended up with is a mediocre drama about the relationship between the IRA and a drug dealer - and honestly, even though it is viewable, it's not exactly brilliant.

If drugs are your thing I guess you may enjoy it. I was hoping for something less brash, less linear, and just more. The fault lies mainly in the script, the script is just not picking the superb moments that would have lifted this to another level, and is way too "and then this happens."

Given the material this could have been an excellent film, it's just OK.

Howard Marks (Rhys Ifans) comes from Garw in Wales. He was the smartest kid in the coal mining region and gets beaten up for it. He gets into Oxford. One night, Ilze Kadegis (Elsa Pataky) crawls through his window and he follows her to a life of drugs. They get married and become teachers. The straight life doesn't last long. Ilze divorces him and he falls for Judy (Chloë Sevigny). When his friend Graham Plinson (Jack Huston) gets arrested in Germany, he goes over and helps transport a car filled with hashish. It's the start of a life of crime as he smuggles drugs from Afghanistan to Britain. He gets involved with IRA member Jim McCann (David Thewlis),arrested trying to smuggle into America, does a deal with the British government, and then escape.

This is one biopic that is definitely less exciting than the real story. It's more of a long rambling list of crazy life. It's not done in the most exciting ways. He is simply a Nice guy with loving relationships who falls into a life of crime of a delivery guy. There is a lack of intensity or drama. It's a lot of wacky and outrageous. The danger doesn't feel visceral. It's definitely a crazy life and I can see the difficulty of distilling the random craziness into a cohesive story.

Nothing really serious, this just tries to entertain you. And it does achieve it most of the time. The acting is really good. Though I'm not sure if this is really based on anything that really happened (and if so, how accurate it did handle it).

The humor is not to everyones taste and there is a weird mixture with drama and adult themes going on. The UK rating still seemed a bit too high for my taste (no pun intended). It must have been the themes it did touch I guess. The story has bumps here and there, that do not allow you to be completely on top of it. Still despite those flaws, there is much fun to be had, with the rest of it.