Contraband Lacks Thrills

This January thriller doesn’t aim for the stars and neither did Baltasar Kormakur, director of Contraband.

His gritty handheld style of shooting intensifies the action of a storyline Kormakur knows well (he directed and starred in the Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, from which Contraband is based). Kormakur, whose experience in hard hitting action can be seen in Jar City, takes the viewer through industrial New Orleans, the slums of Panama, and pysco-gangster layers as hero Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) tries to find his way out of mix-up after mix-up.

Farraday is an expert smuggler-turned-good-guy, but is pulled back to the dark side when his idiot brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) botches a deal with some skull-cracking gangsters. Now the drug lord (Giovanni Ribisi) is threatening to kill his entire family unless he gets his money. So the misadventure begins. Farraday’s quick solution is to assemble his A-team of smugglers from the past (which isn’t anywhere as reliable as the A-Team or as playful as Oceans 11) for one last voyage to Panama to get $14 million in funny money. Giddy to be back in the smuggling game, we get to see the quick intelligence and cool authority that makes Walhberg indestructible, even against the biggest and baddest gangster—no matter how many guns, poisonous snakes, or wolves he has with him. The deal with the Panamanian gangster obviously goes sour (quick lesson: always print your funny money on starch paper or Mark Walhberg might bash your head in) so Farraday must take his business to the real hardcore smugglers. There, after more goes wrong, he winds up owing them a favor and takes an almost suicidal role in a heist involving an armored bank car and lots of AK-47s. Stealing money, unloading rounds at cops, and getting in some good ass-kicking time, Farraday shows off his old street skills and leaves Panama with the goods. The hard part now is hiding the stacks on stacks on stacks of money from his superiors on the massive cargo ship heading back to New Orleans.

When Farraday’s wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), urges him not to go back to his illegitimate hoodlum ways, he argues, “Family is family,” which is weird because in order to save his brother-in-law, he leaves his wife and kids vulnerable to harassment from the main drug lord who loves threats, his small revolver, and crashing his car into buildings. The drug lord’s greasy-weasel look and bad Marlin Brando voice only add to his creepiness and assures Farraday that if this mission goes wrong his family is dead. The only one watching out for the family is Farraday’s best friend and ex-partner (Ben Foster) who the viewer gets to learn more about as the movie progresses.

The most boring parts of the movie come on the cargo ship where Farraday’s crew must be on alert at all times in a must-beat-the-clock scenario. Here, the pace of the movie cuts back and forth between comical coincidences, gangster violence, and enriching emotional family contact in an attempt to add substance to a genre famous for lacking it. There are some twists and turns and “Oh, no he didn’t!” moments, which definitely add to an action packed thriller that doesn’t thrill and isn’t so action packed. However, in this month of low expectations Contraband leaves the viewer tastefully satisfied, and if you didn’t see the ending coming, you may be slightly surprised. You may be let down if you expected to see Shooter or The Departed Mark Walhberg; Contraband can be considered one of those Marky Mark films.