Film - Charlotte Raven finds few highs in a tale of the cocaine trade

The best cocaine scene I have ever seen in a film was the bit in Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman takes it on her date in Jack Rabbit Slims. Excusing herself from the table where she and John Travolta are having a slightly stilted conversation, she goes to the bathroom to "powder my nose". The brilliant thing about what follows (apart from her expression in the mirror, which looks as if it has been fizzed in a Soda Stream) is the absence of any hyperbole in Quentin Tarantino's treatment of the drug's effect. Thurman doesn't take off her clothes, scream "Arrriba!" or start swinging from the light fittings. She just goes back to where she and Travolta were sitting, and starts talking, a little more earnestly than before, with a slightly misplaced animation - and that's it until she decides, with a seriousness of purpose recognisable to anyone who has ever taken this drug, that she wants to enter the dancing competition: "I want to win that trophy." The famous sequence that follows is a near-perfect portrayal of that sublime combination of humourlessness and physical abandon that is unique to the cocaine experience.

It is strange that Blow, a film about cocaine, should have no such convincing moments. The drug is consumed in bucketloads, but no one ever looks like they've taken it until they have had so much that they are a paranoid, gibbering wreck. There is no sense of degeneration, nor any real idea of how the interlude between being straight and needing urgent medical assistance might have felt for either the dealers or the consumers in the great US cocaine boom of the 1970s. Without this, the people risking their lives to get the stuff out of Colombia and into the hands of eager partygoers seem like they might just as well be dealing in sugar or iron ore. We know that what they are doing is illegal, but the movie kowtows to its hero's idea that he is just another entrepreneur. This makes the film's eventual insistence that the signifiers of George Jung's success - the fast cars and fabulous girls - were irrelevant, compared with the spiritual cost of securing them, seem irritatingly hypocritical. If you are going to rely on styling, rather than characterisation, to carry your movie, you should not be surprised if people can't relate to the rush of late-onset ethics that tries, and fails, to retract all that went before. When Jung (played by Johnny Depp) gets busted the final time and is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, we see this as bad luck, rather than a moral consequence of the life he has chosen to lead.

This film wants to have it both ways. It wants to show Jung as a hero - "a typical boy next door who decides to pursue the American dream his way by becoming the first American to import cocaine into the United States on a large scale" - and also as the archetypal victim of a mindset that doesn't grasp the difference between adrenaline highs and real happiness. Throughout the film, Depp seems unsure which side to come down on. Is he meant to be a lovable rogue whose aptitude for what he is doing seduces us to the point where we forget what he does? Or a charismatic, distant figure with a Gatsbyesque misapprehension about the value of the world he inhabits? Or a cute boy led astray by nothing more than the promise of wild sex and endless all-night parties? Rather than make a decision, Depp goes for the line of least resistance and plays Jung as a deadpan cipher whose emotional range is limited to several different versions of staring. When he is happy, he stares straight ahead; when he is sad, he stares into the middle distance; and when he is fucked up on drugs, he stares around, like an eagle-eyed action man, until a bead of sweat appears on his brow. The effect of this is disconcerting, because the audience is never sure what Depp's expression connotes. Given that he looks the same when he is off his head and having the time of his life as he does when he has been shopped by his mother, it could be anything.

I found, in the end, that by far the best way of judging how one is meant to respond to Depp's scenes is to refer to the analogous bit in Goodfellas. The director of Blow, Ted Demme, has been more than a little influenced by Scorsese, but, sadly, has not had the good sense to keep this from his audience. The deadpan voice-over; the trajectory of Jung's story from working-class roots, through his rise in crime to his fall, and the cocaine paranoia that prefigures it; the screaming women who love the high life but who, at the slightest sign of danger, bubble over like emotional pressure cookers - it's all here. Even Ray Liotta makes an appearance as Jung's honest but put-upon dad. God knows why Demme cast him, as it simply encourages us to compare this tedious, trite little film with Scorsese's masterpiece. It's like watching a Sunday watercolourist paint the same water lilies as Monet: you don't blame him for trying, but you sure as hell wouldn't pay to go and see it.

Blow (18) is out on general release

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