Rogue Trader

YOU MAY have already forgotten the name of Nick Leeson, whose fifteen minutes of fame should by rights have ended with his six-year incarceration in a Singapore prison.

Very much a product of his time and place, Leeson was a brash, high-spirited Watford whizzkid who wreaked havoc on the money markets of the Far East and ultimately caused the collapse of Barings Bank. Rogue Trader is an intriguing, if unduly sympathetic biopic, which charts the guy’s rise and fall, with the obscene consumption of the Thatcher/Major years laid bare in all their tainted glory.

Leeson might seem an unlikely hero for a movie, since the consensus is that he was an insufferably smug little proto-Tory wanker who deserved everything he got.

Luckily, the likeability problem is solved by casting Ewan McGregor in the lead role, since the young Scot brings an irrepressible charm to every role he occupies: while Leeson doesn’t exactly emerge as a saint, MacGregor manages to humanise him to a remarkable degree.

The overriding impression the film conveys is of a harmless tosser with way too much ambition for his own good, let down by his own greed and recklessness, but entirely lacking in malice. The film’s "Sympathy For Poor Nick" agenda is a fairly risky one which probably won’t cut much ice outside the guy’s immediate family, but Rogue Trader itself is a surprisingly enjoyable affair which zips past at a decent enough pace, and throws up one or two worthwhile laughs without ever threatening to become truly memorable.

McGregor lifts it out of the sub-ordinary, rendering Leeson a compelling combination of super-ego and brass balls – even if his wide-eyed naivete is a little hard to swallow, given the truly incredible sums of money he was playing with. Anna Friel provides plenty of sex-appeal (if fuck-all else) in the role of Nick’s adoring wife, while the storyline becomes progressively more involving the deeper Nick plunges into the shit.

There’s even a moral in there too (don’t get caught, whatever you do). It all ended in tears, of course, but Rogue Trader is a good deal more fun than it has any right to be, and makes for surprisingly involving drama.