Featuring more-or-less a who’s who of young, skinny, intense white male actors, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s New-Orleans-to-Panama-and-back smuggling thriller Contraband boasts an embarrassment of sweaty, gritty riches.
A host of writhing, scheming Ratso Rizzo-looking youths convolute themselves around Mark Wahlberg, who plays retired smuggling prince Chris Farraday, latter-day leader of a successful smuggling ring gone legit installing alarm systems.
He’s forced to get back in the game by a debt incurred by his brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) to a hilariously gross grease-ball goon played with squeaking glee by Giovanni Ribisi. Leaving his wife, played by Kate Beckinsale, in the care of his former partner–in-crime Sebastian (Ben Foster), Farraday is soon blowing things up all over Panama City, on the run from and with junior hefe Gonzalo (Diego Luna).
What’s new in the film works very well – Kormákur, who played the Farraday character in the original Icelandic film, Reykjavík-Rotterdam, fills up parts of it with clever details of the actual smuggling operation. Holes cut in bulk-heads, deals struck with engine-room workers to delay the departure of a ship, the film has just enough authentic-seeming smuggler-craft to paper over the bulk of the film that’s pretty familiar – the guy coming out of retirement for one last score, the threatened powerless wife, the cross, the double-cross, etc., etc.. Despite the film's familiar seeming bits and pieces, the whole thing works better than the average mid-budget thriller due largely to the seeming authenticity of its locations, interiors and otherwise - while Wahlberg and all are doing familiar things they're doing them in steam-filled boiler rooms and in vans in Panamanian traffic, and it's refreshing.
For the most part, Kormákur keeps things moving, and his cast of talented young squirmers keep the tension up for a pretty prolonged period which, sadly, feels like a special accomplishment worth noting in these days of overblown, hyper-derivative and utterly disposable, goofy genre fare like last year’s say, Trespass. It’s a solid, mostly unoriginal outing that innovates in a few small moments but largely makes the same mistakes that a lot of these macho bro-crime movies make – the one completely pointless female character, who may as well be an animated womb floating through the New Orleans night, serving only as a totem of male vulnerability and not as, like, a person, the one-too-many plot twists, a from-a-mile-away final “gotcha” that mars the subtlety of the rest of the film. That said, it’s way better than you’d expect, and it’s better than they’re making it look in the film’s action-heavy trailer, and for a second weekend in January movie it’s not bad at all.
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