Skip to main content
Close

Contraband: Completely Satisfactory

By Jim Rohner · January 16, 2012

 

I saw Contraband in theaters this past week, and I had to keep actively reminding myself of that during the week because I had to write this review, yet if I had allowed my mind to get too distracted by rigorous activities such as crocheting or haiku writing, I would've entirely forgotten that I had seen the latest cinematic entry from "Marky" Mark Wahlberg.  That's not to say Contraband is bad, though.  In all actuality, for a January action-crime film from an Icelandic director and debut screenwriter whom you've never heard of, Contrabad is completely satisfactory.

Contraband is so called because Chris Farraday (the funkiest of the funky bunch himself) used to be the "Houdini of smugglers."  He got out of the life years ago to raise a family with his wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), and start his own security business (delicious irony).  Kate's feelings about his past life are unclear as she makes no bones about shushing her hunky husband when he openly and cumbersomely exposits about his best score during the wedding reception of friend and former partner in crime, Danny (Lucas Haas). 

Speaking of former partners in crime, another one is Chris's best friend and former best man, Sebastian (Ben Foster), who has also left the life, but still keeps his ears tuned to the black market signal, which is fortuitous considering the phone call Kate gets informing her that her screw up of a smuggler brother, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), has wound up in the hospital. 

Andy is black and blue and donning a hospital gown thanks to the wrath of local smuggler Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), who was just a tad bit upset that Andy had to dump $700,000 worth of cocaine when customs boarded the ship he was using to smuggle it.  The tab, as you can imagine, is a bit more than Chris and Kate can afford and unable to strike a repayment deal, Chris must reluctantly re-enter the life.  Assembling a crew and using his incarcerated father's (William Lucking) connections to get himself on the crew of a ship captained by the hard-ass Camp (J.K. Simmons), Chris is off to Panama to smuggle back millions in counterfeit bills while Kate awaits his return, vulnerable to the threats of the tenacious Briggs.

Contraband is essentially Ocean's Eleven on a boat only with a budget that could just afford one A-lister and the tone of good-natured pilfering replaced with gravely serious matters of life and death.  If you can get past the fact that Barry Ackroyd assumes he's still shooting a Paul Greengrass film, you'll a crime caper that revels in the joy of a band of highly skilled criminals reuniting to pull off a high risk, high reward job with a healthy dose of twists, turns and near misses along the way.   It's nothing we haven't seen before, but if you're a fan of Mark Wahlberg acting all tough and quipping one-liners in between beating the shit out of guys with less sculpted abs, you'll find plenty to keep you satisfied.

But I don't mean to be dismissive; Contraband gets a lot of things right.  Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (who?) does a pretty good job setting up why we should care about things and Baltasar Kormakur (seriously, who?!) does a pretty good job making us care about them.  The twists make sense and add a lot to a consistent sense of building tension and aside from a criminally misuses Diego Luna, the performances, highlighted by Ribisi's N'awlins drawl and Wahlberg's aforementioned sass, are pretty pitch perfect. 

But at the end of the day, Contraband is the quintessential January release – a film that requires very little mental capacity from its audience and thus, gets it, does its job and gets out.  There are much worse ways to spend your $12 – the previously reviewed The Devil Inside, perhaps – but if you're still thinking about it 2 days later, it's probably got something to do with the fact that you didn't see The Muppets or Hugo before they left theaters.