Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) made his bones in the criminal world as a smuggler. He was the best. Anything you need to get over a border undetected, big or small, he could find a way. But that was the past. Now he has a wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids, and he’s traded his life of crime for a legit business where he works as a security consultant, and a home life that is considerably less thrilling than making drug runs over the Panamanian border. Yes, life is pretty good for Mr. Farraday. Until one day when his wife’s younger brother (Caleb Landry Jones) botches a job for a mumble-mouthed drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi) and gets the family in over their head to the number of around $700 thousand. It then becomes up to Farraday to come to his family’s aid, step back into the criminal life, and perform one last, high risk job to keep his wife and kids out of danger.
If all of that sounds overly familiar, it’s because Contraband is the sort of brainless action movie that gets churned out by the hundreds every year and that doesn’t have an original bone in its body. On the page, especially considering this is one of those remakes of a recent foreign film, Contraband has no reason at all to exist. But it also has a couple elements that make it seem like it might be worth your time. The supporting cast features talented names like Ben Foster, J.K. Simmons, and Diego Luna. And the movie does feature an action packed armored car robbery sequence that includes machine gun wielding bad guys wearing duct tape bandit masks. Duct tape bandit masks have to count for something, don’t they?
Unfortunately, the glimpses of good just aren’t enough to make up for all the bad going on. One of the first things that hits you as soon as this movie opens is how clunky the dialogue is. In the first five minutes we get hit with paragraphs of unnatural monologues that explain to us the intricacies of smuggling, and that just sets the pace for the rest of the film. The camera work is less than acceptable as well. In an attempt at inserting some gritty realism, or perhaps a bit of style, we get a bunch of faux documentary cinematography that includes sudden zoom ins and the like. It’s a case of over crafting and every time one of these flourishes showed up it took me out of the story and reminded me I was watching a movie. Heck, the performances weren’t even worth checking out either.
Luna and Simmons are admittedly fun in small roles, but they don’t get enough screen time or focus to really amount to anything overall. And Beckinsale gets nothing to do as the wife other than play the role of the concerned lady. That leaves us with Wahlberg as the lead, and Foster and Ribisi as his right hand man and arch-enemy respectively. Mark Wahlberg isn’t a terrible actor, but really the only time he’s fun to watch is when he’s playing funny and dumb. In these starring roles, where he’s either playing the average Joe or the big damn hero, he couldn’t be more lifeless. You might as well prop a mannequin up in his place for all he brings to these roles, and this film is so substitute. Were his eyes even open during every scene? There were parts of the film where I forgot to check.
On the opposite end of that spectrum are Foster and Ribisi. Both of these actors have become known for big roles full of showy affectations, and each is putting on their own personal show here. The difference between these two guys is that generally I buy everything that Foster does, no matter how crazy he’s playing, but Ribisi always comes off as phony to me. In this case, I liked Foster for half of the film, but towards the end his character takes turns that are so sudden and so senseless that no actor could have pulled them off. Ribisi... Ribisi is Ribisi. Here he completely fails to intimidate playing a drug dealing heavy, and he never feels at all authentic when trying to pull off one of his patented stupid voices. Every second that he’s on screen you’re completely aware that he’s an actor trying to pull off a risky performance, and at no point can you suspend disbelief and tell yourself that he’s a real person. Foster gets left hung out to dry by this film’s goofy script, but, like always, Ribisi shoots himself in the foot.
All of the failure on display is actually kind of a shame, because for the first half of this thing it was working really well as a stupid action film. As played out as the last big job conceit is, the smuggling aspect of this story was a fairly unique twist on the action elements. And the film was doing really well when it came to constantly ramping its tension up further and further. Cassaday’s family is in danger, and the job he’s pulling takes on a ticking clock element that keeps things nail biting. Also, every step of the way Farraday and his crew encounter new wrinkles that raise the stakes and make their chance for success seem even less likely. It’s this constant turning of the screws that make action movies and thrillers worth watching, and for the first half of this film I was marveling at how well director Baltasar Kormákur and his screenwriters were making such mundane material work. Unfortunately, the breakneck pace they were keeping didn’t last, and about halfway through the momentum of the story dies. That’s when all of the stupid twists start.
It would be pretty impossible for me to thoroughly review this film without talking about the way it ends, but that’s a sticky situation because I still want to avoid giving too much away. Suffice to say, the third act of this movie introduces a big twist, takes a shocking turn, and then completely cops out by pulling a bait and switch that makes everyone involved in crafting this story look balless and lame. The way they wrap up the family in danger plot line is completely stupid as well. The way these movies work is that the family stays in danger until the big moment where the bad guy gets his comeuppance. That’s how you craft an emotionally satisfying ending. This movie wraps up the final fate of the family and then still has the bad guy running around, waiting to be brought to justice. That’s dumb. Once we know what’s happened with the wife and kids all of the tension suddenly gets sucked out of this story and everything that comes after seems pointless. That’s when the movie starts to feel long, and I felt my good will getting sucked away by the second. That would have been enough to sink the ship already, even without the insulting, disingenuous bait and switch that it pulls at the end in order to manipulate the audience and then still bask in the catharsis of a happy, Hollywood ending, but after that I just found this movie to be contemptible. Contraband starts off strong enough, then makes a big, bold move that could have taken it interesting places, but ultimately it doesn’t have the courage to do anything new. So there’s no reason I can think of to recommend this generic thing to anyone.
