“Contraband”

By Bob Garver

The first few months of the year are tra­di­tion­ally the worst as far as get­ting decent new movies. Mega-blockbusters usu­ally open in the sum­mer or around the hol­i­days. Lately the release slates in March and April have been gain­ing steam as well. But Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary are still regarded as a dump­ing ground for lame movies that the stu­dios know would get crushed by the com­pe­ti­tion in a bet­ter sea­son. Speak­ing of lame movies that would never sur­vive against real com­pe­ti­tion, Mark Wahlberg has a new movie out called “Con­tra­band”. You can prob­a­bly guess from the trailer that it got dumped in Jan­u­ary because it’s a piece of junk, the film itself spends 110 min­utes con­firm­ing that theory.

Wahlberg stars as Chris Far­ra­day, an ex-smuggler who’s been suc­cess­fully legit for a few years now. He is cur­rently enjoy­ing a domes­tic life with his wife Kate (Kate Beck­in­sale) and his two kids. He still hangs out with a buddy from his smug­gling days (Ben Fos­ter), and he looks to be about ready to straighten up soon. Trou­ble arises when his brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) botches an impor­tant run for the mali­cious Briggs (Gio­vanni Ribisi). Andy now owes Briggs $700,000, which means that the whole fam­ily owes Briggs $700,000. Andy’s not too bright, so it’s up to Chris to save the day. His old friend has plenty of smug­gling work avail­able, so Chris just has to pull one last job.

The job requires that Chris take a job on a boat work­ing for an unpleas­ant cap­tain (J.K. Sim­mons). In order for his plan to work, he has to do some minor sab­o­tag­ing of the boat. The film over­es­ti­mates how much its view­ers under­stand the mechan­i­cal work­ings of such a boat, espe­cially when it comes to its fuel sys­tem. I was com­pletely lost dur­ing these scenes. I wish Chris had just made every­one worry about a hole or some­thing. I know holes are bad for boats.

The film tries to build sus­pense with the smug­gling job itself. The prob­lem with doing this is that you know Chris is going to have to make it home because that’s where the bad guys are and they need to be dealt with. There is one scary part where he gets on the wrong side of a Pana­man­ian crime boss (Diego Luna), who is too psy­chotic to make a good crim­i­nal, but unpre­dictable enough to be a threat. But mostly this chunk of the film is just dull trick­ery that’s been done to death in death in the “Ocean’s” movies.

The ele­ment that peo­ple are going to remem­ber most about “Con­tra­band” is the amount of abuse taken by Kate, the wife. Briggs wants his money, and he doesn’t much care that Chris is out of town get­ting it. He gives her some unfor­give­able “warn­ings”. She suf­fers even more vio­lence at the hands of another vil­lain. I seri­ously ques­tion the logic on the part of the char­ac­ters (it makes Chris less likely to atone and more likely to get back at them) and I ques­tion the logic of hav­ing these types of scenes in the film at all. Nobody’s ques­tion­ing the stakes, includ­ing dis­turb­ing scenes to reestab­lish them is unnec­es­sary and it takes away from the spir­ited atti­tude that the film wants to have.

All the new releases in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary are going to be about as worth­less as “Con­tra­band”. But the sea­son does have an upside and that’s the wider expan­sion of Acad­emy Awards nom­i­nees. You’ll prob­a­bly have a chance to see “The Artist” and “The Descen­dants” in the com­ing weeks, I sug­gest you do so. I’m hop­ing that the films are pop­u­lar enough to jus­tify arti­cles and then I can write two of my most pos­i­tive reviews of the year.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“Con­tra­band” is rated R for vio­lence, per­va­sive lan­guage, and some drug use. Its run­ning time is 110 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.