Review: Contraband

It’s rarely a positive sign when an action-thriller—particularly one that boasts an established leading man and a plethora of engaging character actors—is saddled with a dreary mid-January release date by its distributor. Nothing says “Frankly, we haven’t the foggiest notion of how to market this film,” like an opening three weeks after Christmas. In that context, it’s a tad surprising that Contraband doesn’t resolve into a something far worse than the brisk, lively, but thoroughly unchallenging piece of macho film-making it is. Icelandic actor-turned-director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Sea, Jar City) seems almost charmingly determined to embrace genre cliché while also aiming for an earnest, gritty heist film. There is no trace of sarcasm or satire in his direction, nor in the screenplay by first-time writer Aaron Guzikowski. This resolute refusal to smirk rests uneasily alongside Contraband‘s wholehearted embrace of well-worn Hollywood convention. The resulting work is strictly middlebrow as action pictures go, but also more proficient and gripping than the ghastly stuff that passes for summer popcorn fare of late.

A loose remake of the 2008 Icelandic feature, Reykjavik-Rotterdam—a film in which Kormákur starred in the role filled here by Mark Wahlberg—Contraband is yet another entry in the overstuffed One Last Big Score sub-genre. Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) is an ex-smuggler who has settled down in his native New Orleans and started his own home-security business. Unfortunately, his lackwit brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) is still running illicit goods, and by the end of the film’s opening scene has botched a job and annoyed drawling kingpin Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi) to the tune of six figures. Chris is therefore forced—reluctantly, of course—to reunite with former partner Sebastian (Ben Foster) and assemble a team for an ambitious smuggling run between New Orleans and Panama City, Panama, all for the purpose of paying off Andy’s debt and protecting his own wife (Kate Beckinsale) and sons from Briggs’ rage. The scheme ostensibly involves four palettes of counterfeit U.S. dollars, but before long drugs and fine art enter the picture, albeit not at Chris’ choosing.

The narrative components and rhythms that make up Contraband are all overly familiar, even if they have never been lassoed specifically into the service of a story about the shadowy business of smuggling. The clandestine transport of illicit goods has been touched upon in noir potboilers and pointed political dramas before, but colorful outlaw smugglers are hardly typical protagonists for a Hollywood thriller. In this respect, at least, Contraband scores a rare point for originality. The second season of David Simon’s The Wire explored similar terrain, but Kormákur’s breakneck film is about as far from that sprawling television epic as one can imagine. The proceedings drag a bit early on, but once the reasons for Chris’ final heist are established, Contraband picks up speed significantly. It proceeds breathlessly through all manner of below-decks skullduggery, nautical mishaps, gangland standoffs, an armored car robbery, razor-thin escapes, ticking clocks, and a Hollywood-mandated third act betrayal.

Plausibility is in short supply in Guzikowski’s script , but Contraband never blinks in acknowledgment of its ludicrous character. This places the film in the strange no-man’s-land between grim, thematically dense auteurist actioners (The Dark Knight) and slick, lightweight triumphs of spectacle (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol). The result is singularly unusual: an outlandish, ultimately forgettable film of slight artistic ambition, which nonetheless tackles its story and subject with sobriety. Kormákur’s approach is generally lean and persuasive, although it occasionally indulges in pointless touches, such as short, shaky zooms that seem more at home in a mumblecore feature. The director’s talent for maintaining narrative velocity—helped along by fine work from longtime editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir and District 9 composer Clinton Shorter—bestows Contraband with a tingling aura of desperation and pandemonium. In these gray months when the theaters are packed with unworthy awards-bait films, such exhilarating diversion is just enough.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.