Dull, dull, dull and that's just the interesting bits

Rating: 3/10 (12 October 2013)

I have no idea what the protocol is on reviewing films here, but I do imagine you must actually have seen the film before you are able to post a review, and the IMDb staffers who toil daily and nightly to bring these are scribblings to a grateful public assume that you have done so. But what if you did not see all of the film? What if the film you are reviewing was so damn dull, so damn unengaging that you gave up halfway and went off to find something better to do - the washing up, perhaps, or comb the dog for fleas. Perhaps you were so damn bored by the film that instead you decided to seek out the nearest newly-painted wall and sit before it for several hours to keep an eye on the paint as it dried.
I have no idea why Blow was so dull and unengaging, but dull and unengaging it was and I would happily have swapped the 35 minutes or so of it I did watch for some more interesting pastime (learning by heart next week's TV schedule, perhaps). I was drawn to it because Johnny Depp and Ray Liotta, two of my favourite actors, are in it. But even they couldn't save it.
Another reviewer here complained that the film was morally suspect in that it didn't condemn drug-taking and, in fact, almost seemed to condone it. Well, I shall not make the same complaint. But I shall point out that because several million folk in the U.S. and Europe are keen to be kept supplied with weed and coke, it is thriving, multi-billion pound industry. And because so many billions can be made producing, transporting and dealing in weed and coke those doing the producing, transporting and dealing manage to get by on as few scruples as possible. Oh, and they aren't at all bothered that a great many innocent people as well a great many of their own kind are murdered in cold blood to keep the industry going. If you want to be really shocked, google the figures of how many lives the drug trade has claimed in, say, the past ten years in Mexico, Colombia and surrounding states. You'll find they are in the the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Given that fact, the jokey tone of the film was to put it mildly utterly inappropriate.
That is not, however, the film's worst failing. It's worst failing is that it is dull, dull, dull. Or at least the 35-odd minutes I could be bothered to watch. Quite how Blow gets an average 7.5 rating is beyond me.