![]() ![]() Things quickly fall apart and with only hours to reach the cash, Chris must use his rusty skills to successfully navigate a treacherous criminal network of brutal drug lords, cops and hit men before his wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), and sons become their target. Chris is a legendary smuggler and quickly assembles a crew with the help of his best friend, Sebastian (Ben Foster), to head to Panama and return with millions in counterfeit bills. Set in New Orleans, the film explores the cutthroat underground world of international smuggling-full of desperate criminals and corrupt officials, high-stakes and big payoffs-where loyalty rarely exists and death is one wrong turn away.Ĭhris Farraday (Wahlberg) long ago abandoned his life of crime, but after his brother-in-law, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), botches a drug deal for his ruthless boss, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), Chris is forced back into doing what he does best-running contraband-to settle Andy’s debt. Mark Wahlberg leads the cast of Contraband, a fast-paced thriller about a man trying to stay out of a world he worked so hard to leave behind and the family he’ll do anything to protect. Produced by: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Baltasar Kormákur, Stephen Levinson, Mark WahlbergĮxecutive Producers: Liza Chasin, Debra Hayward, Bill Johnson Contraband Synopsis: But it’s disappointing that for all the character’s guile, Farraday’s master stroke is stolen wholesale from a sequence in Sergio Leone’s great underrated gangster saga “Once Upon a Time in America” – which makes him a ripoff merchant at least as much as he’s a smuggler.Contraband Movie Review | By Ĭast: Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster, Giovanni Ribisi, Lukas Haas, Caleb Landry Jones, Diego Luna and J.K. Not that I’ve nothing against a thriller taking itself seriously, but “Contraband” trades in too many clichés and contrivances to work up any genuine emotional engagement, and when it does threaten to do something risky or unpredictable, Kormakur immediately pulls his punches.Īs usual, Wahlberg supplies the center of gravity and grounds the show with the kind of dogged determination that is his forte. “ The Hurt Locker” cinematographer Barry Ackroyd does his best to inject some gritty realism into the proceedings, but several forced and farfetched plot developments might have been better served with the self-consciously flip, flash style pioneered by Luc Besson than the gloomy, low-key naturalistic approach. Even then, you might come across more action, and certainly meatier drama, in a typical episode of “Breaking Bad.” ![]() And of course there’s Luna’s lunatic to deal with. Then the “funny money” he and his contrabanditos mean to ship back to the land of the free proves laughably easy to detect. Things pick up when Farraday’s plan starts to unravel.Īpproaching the docks at full speed, the tanker nearly carves out a brand new Panama Canal. But there’s not much here for any of them to sink their teeth into.Ī sluggish first act only occasionally sputters into life, mostly when Ribisi is given the floor. Simmons, David O’Hara and Diego Luna as a crazed Panamanian gangster. Reworking the Icelandic film that he produced and starred in three years ago, “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” Baltasar Kormakur has assembled a very decent cast that also includes Kate Beckinsale (as Mrs. In truth, Farraday seems more like a one-man band, the brains and the beauty, with the reliably unreliable Foster relegated to more of a Pete Best role. ![]() He and best buddy Ben Foster were the “Lennon and McCartney of smuggling,” we’re told in the first scene, though it’s up to us to work out which is which. Wahlberg’s character, Farraday, is something of a legend in these circles. Mark Wahlberg is (get this) the reluctant criminal: a married-with-kids security consultant forced to return to his first love when his brother-in-law panics and deep-sixes a cocaine shipment intended for a deliciously unreasonable Giovanni Ribisi. Look on “The Devil Inside,” “Contraband” and even Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire” as a kind of collective cleanse as the studios attempt to flush out all the pretension and excess accrued from the holiday period.Īs rudimentary as its name, “Contraband” is a straightforward crime thriller, its only claim to novelty hailing from the significant portion of the action set on board a tanker en route from New Orleans to Panama (and back again). This is the time of year when Hollywood traditionally gets back to basics, almost as if it’s embarrassed by the number of worthy Oscar hopefuls clogging up the multiplexes. ![]()
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