A relatively fast-paced, tense and gritty B-grade movie, Contraband follows a familiar heist formula to produce a solid dose of escapist entertainment.
Produced by Mark Wahlberg and directed by Baltasar Kormakur, who acted in the original Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam, on which Contraband is based, it's a smuggler's story given the Hollywood treatment and moved from Europe to New Orleans and Panama.
Mark Wahlberg is perfectly cast as Chris Farraday, a reformed blue-collar family man with a dodgy past as being a well-known smuggler. It's a less ambitious role than Wahlberg's recent outings in The Fighter and The Departed, but is the kind of no-nonsense character Wahlberg does well. When Farraday's brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) gets in serious trouble with local drug lord Briggs (Ribisi), Farraday and his family are dragged into the drama and he's left with little choice but to pull off one last job to save his family.
This is one of those films where there are good bad people and real bad people. The good baddies do illegal things for the right reason, and regardless of the laws they break they're likeable and sympathetic enough to get behind. Chris is one of these guys, and the role is a walk in the park for Wahlberg, who hardly breaks a sweat as he threatens local criminals, bribes his way aboard a ship to Panama, organises counterfeit money to smuggle into America, gets caught up in a major gun fight between police and local Panama thugs, and then beats the Customs system to cruise back into America.
Its predictability and the film's tendency to keep its ambitions in check that give it a B-grade feel. The plot is outlandish, but in a world where everyone is always corrupt, anything is readily achievable; it's all part of the fun. There's a cheat on the action as well, with a reliance on stylistically shaky camerawork failing to make up for a lack of coherency in the action scenes.
