When you go to a mainstream Hollywood movie in January, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get. In most cases it’s going to be terrible; a film that the studios decided to unceremoniously dump because they knew they were dealing with an absolute turd. However, sometimes there are movies like the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Contraband. By all accounts, it is a by-the-numbers crime thriller with nonexistent character development and a dumb-as-nails plot. Yet it succeeds because it knows precisely what it is without being annoyingly self-aware, and it delivers a handful of memorable action scenes carried by a surprisingly strong starring performance from Mark Wahlberg. There’s little ambition and it has a few too many villains for its own good, but when Contraband sticks to the simple stuff it becomes pure, brain cell-killing fun.
Wahlberg plays a onetime smuggler who has since turned straight and started his own home security company. Just when everything seems to be going swimmingly, his brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) gets in trouble with the brutal Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi, with an accent that should go straight to the Hall of Fame), and now Wahlberg must get back in the game in order to keep his family safe. As such, he boards a ship to Panama (captained by J.K. Simmons) in order to get a package from mobster Diego Luna, but things predictably don’t go according to plan. Meanwhile, he keeps his family under the watchful eye of his best friend Ben Foster, and there may be some trouble on that front as well.
One thing that normally kills movies like Contraband is over-explaining. Too often screenplays assume the audience doesn’t know what the heck is going on, and so everything is laid out in front of us in useless lines of dialogue that tell us what we already know. In a lesser movie, Contraband would be full of conversations that give us a step-by-step summary of the smuggling process. Heck, most of the time there will be a character tagging along that has never done any of this before just so the screenwriter has an excuse to write out an instruction manual. Sometimes those are necessary—Inception, anyone?—but if you’re dealing with more earthly crimes it’s normally best to let the audience follow along themselves. Contraband does just that. Every character in the film is familiar with their job, and we just sit back and watch them go to work. From a real-world perspective, what they’re doing probably doesn’t make any sense. In fact, I’ll guarantee it. But what matters is that while I was watching the movie, I was reasonably convinced by everything that was going on.
Most of the cast also seemed surprisingly invested in the film. Ribisi goes waaaaay over-the-top, but other than that everyone seems to know precisely the movie that they’re in and what they need to do to make it work. Obviously, most important of all the cast members is Wahlberg in the lead role. We’ve seen time and time again that he can check out if a film doesn’t play to his strengths—and frankly, it wouldn’t have shocked me if he went into full The Happening mode here—but he does an admirable job of playing the action star who also has a legitimate interest in keeping his family safe. Believe it or not, it’s kind of tough to play a character like this and make it convincing. As great as Wahlberg has been in many movies, his track record would not indicate that Contraband would be his finest hour. But once I was through with this film’s first act, I knew I had been proven wrong.
It’s entirely possible my appreciation of Contraband is a result of the lowered expectations of January, and perhaps if I had reviewed this film in November my take would be slightly different, but I must say there were very few moments when Contraband didn’t have me completely won over. The film was directed by Baltasar Kormákur, an Icelandic actor and filmmaker who starred in the film on which Contraband is based. He does nothing spectacular here, but all he set out to do was make an exciting film about an American smuggler who does one last job to secure his family’s safety. On that level, he asserts himself admirably. It aims not two inches higher, but that was never the intention. This is a January action movie, pure and simple, and it accomplishes everything I could have ever hoped for. No more and no less.
Grade: B
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