CINEMA REVIEW: Rob Peace - unconvincing retelling of remarkable double life

Rob Peace is one of those frustratingly half-decent films that throughout its entire running time seems to hover on the brink of becoming considerably more interesting – and yet never quite manages it.

Based on Jeff Hobbs’ bestselling work of non-fiction, it tells the apparently true story of the most remarkable double life – that of Rob Peace who earns degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry while selling weed on a massive scale in order to fund his efforts to get his dad out of jail, a father he believes has been wrongly convicted of double murder.

All the potential is there, and yet the film never fully sparks to life. It’s made in a fairly unshowy, low-key kind of way, but ultimately it’s the film’s low-key unshowiness which probably undermines it. We saw it in the tiniest auditorium at Cineworld; it’s clear it’s not destined for long on the big screens.

It probably needed to be rather more than quietly absorbing with its story of a young lad with a brilliant mind who is desperate to improve the world through his remarkable scientific knowledge and instinct, but who can’t – simply because of his ghastly family circumstances, circumstances which will always hold him back.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, who also wrote the piece and directs it, is Rob’s dodgy dad – dodgy but not awful. And yet, out of nowhere, he’s imprisoned for murder. Rob’s mother urges Rob to find his own way in life, starting off by changing his name and distancing himself from his father’s fate. But Rob can’t let go – and his tragedy is that he starts to do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. When his father’s appeal fails, Rob, now high-flying at Yale, needs to find more dosh. So he moves in on the rich white boys’ market and starts his drug-selling operation. He’s still aiming high with his hopes for his scientific research, but he’s diving distinctly low in his night-time activities.

The most interesting moment comes when his girlfriend confronts the uncomfortable truth. Rob is turning bad because he refuses to go public with his dad’s imprisonment. As she suggests, if he truly believed his dad was innocent, Rob would be staging big public fund-raisers to bring in the money he needs to fight his legal battles. The fact that he won’t and can’t suggests a lingering doubt: did his father really kill those two women?

And that’s as strong as the film gets, with a bizarre final third in which urban regeneration and estate agency become Rob’s modus operandi.

Jay Will is excellent as Rob Peace, similarly Mary J Blige as his mother Jackie. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives us all the complexities and ambiguities of the father. And of course there is great poignancy in the gulf between Rob’s hopes and his reality, between his dreams and his actions, but the whole thing doesn’t totally convince that this is a tale that we particularly need to hear.

But maybe the wider context is that after a poor summer at the cinema, at least this is a film that will make you think.