Rick Jr – nicknamed “White Boy Rick” by his mostly black friends and cohorts – is plainly not a good kid, but, as sketched by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller’s script, he’s not a villain either. Aided and abetted by the FBI, Rick is soon getting rich as a drug dealer. The lopsided narrative struggles to accommodate a top-form McConaugheyThe extraordinary true life of Rick Wershe, a teenage FBI informant turned teenage drug dealer, makes for a curiously downplayed film. Despite its gangland setting, and despite having the talented Yann Demange at the helm (who wrested genre thrills from the Northern Irish conflict in ’71), there’s not nearly enough sense of jeopardy in White Boy Rick. As churlish as it sounds, White Boy Rick is enjoyable enough but desperately in need of more clichés.

Source: The Irish Times December 07, 2018 04:52 UTC