Jason Sudeikis and Lee Pace star in a flashy true-crime thriller about the an
FBI informant and his car-making crony
Screenwriter and novelist Colin Bateman has here scripted a flashy but watchable true-crime thriller in the style of
American Made (2017) or Blow (2001).
It’s based on the stranger-than-fiction case of Jim Hoffman, a drug-runner and FBI informant who in the late 70s happened to be a
California neighbour of automobile entrepreneur John DeLorean, who at that time was having real trouble selling the sports car he had designed, with its falcon-wing doors and its unreliable engine, coming sluggishly off the production line in a Northern
Ireland factory with financial help from the
British government. (The car’s sole success was its iconic appearance in Back to the Future.) Desperate for cash, DeLorean accepted a dodgy deal from Hoffman, hoping to ease his cash-flow worries with cocaine profits from Hoffman’s sleazy drug-dealer contacts.