George Jung was a pioneer in the cocaine trade, the man who, almost single-handedly, made it the drug of choice in the Seventies and Eighties. Blow is a true story, more or less, that portrays Jung as the most benevolent drug dealer that ever lived, a man more sinned against than sinning. Depp plays Jung with a Charles Bronson monotone, and the script gives him only one tragic flaw -- a fear of poverty that compels him to go from selling pot to coke as the times go from free love to desperate hedonism. Depp is lucky -- it’s a character more complex than the one given to Penelope Cruz, who plays his shrieking, coke-addled banshee of a wife.

Jung hooks up with Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel, and the film implies that Jung was just a fall guy, a decent man made a scapegoat for the truly awful violence, corruption and destruction that the commercial drug trade brought in its wake. To a, by-now obligatory soundtrack of Seventies “classic rock”, we see Jung make money on an unimaginable scale, then lose it all to bigger criminals like Escobar’s henchmen and dictators like Panama’s Noriega. We see the regret on his friends’ faces as they set him up for the DEA. We are meant to feel a tug at the heartstrings as he rots in prison, cut off from everyone he loved. It’s all, ultimately, an unconvincing load of sentimental rubbish.