Mark of a fighter
Mark Wahlberg’s a star at beating people up — sincerely
Wahlberg is good at beating people up with sincerity, which he does in the new thriller Contraband
Mark Wahlberg isn’t blessed with a wide range of acting talent, but he’s very good at beating people up and looking sincere about it. This makes him perfect as the hero of Contraband, a heist movie in which a guy who left the rackets has to take on that inevitable one more job, only to see things get so complicated that there’s nothing to do but beat people up. With sincerity.
Wahlberg plays Chris, a reformed smuggler now working as an installer of security systems in New Orleans. This seems like a good idea, especially as the city portrayed here — by director Baltasar Kormakur, who starred in the original Icelandic version of the film, called Reykjavik-rotterdam — highlights the grittier, darker parts of town. This also holds true when the movie moves to Panama and we take a tour of the muddier, more warehouse-oriented neighbourhoods. In addition, all the men in Contraband, even the good ones, come from the bleaker, less moral section of humanity.
Chris is pulled back into the life when his brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) — a second-rate relation who alternates between screwing things up and cowering — runs afoul of a local drug lord named Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), a thin, sadistic bully and a pretty lousy drug lord, to boot. A scraggly beard hides Ribisi’s signature Cupid’s-bow mouth, but you know it’s there, and it makes him seem more creepy than threatening. It’s hard to figure how he got to be a lord; it must be a hereditary title.
To straighten things out, Chris has to do that one last job. He’ll go to Panama on a container ship — manned by a genial group of thieves and led by J.K. Simmons as a wonderfully cranky captain — leaving his wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and two children behind. They’re safe in the care of his friend Sebastian (Ben Foster), although he turns out to be kind of a B-team buddy, to be honest.
Things start to go wrong almost from the start, and although Chris is an ingenious conveyor of counterfeit money, cocaine and other illicit items, his cohorts — not to mention his enemies — are pretty well the gang that couldn’t smuggle straight. “Don’t act like you don’t love this s—,” Andy says as he watches Chris swing into action, and our hero, apparently dragged back into the life he hates, says with a smile, “Am I that obvious?” It’s a winning smile, too: It’s part of what makes Wahlberg’s mayhem so engaging.
Contraband cuts between the tensions of the ever-changing heist and the perils backhome,whichisjustaswell,because, left to our own devices, we might notice the several large holes in the plot structure: the coincidences of a major robbery taking place just when Chris needs a job, his role in the robbery (what were they going to do without him?), the way he manages to get goods on and off his container ship . . . the entire movie, actually. As it is, we notice these things later, but by then, it’s too late to get your money back.
The original film was Iceland’s nominee for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2010 (it didn’t make the finals), and, buried within the complexities of this remake, you can see the bare bones of an unpretentious little thriller. Contraband isn’t fat, exactly — no special-effects explosions, no expensive car chase — but it’s unremarkable. It’s very good at it, however.