Contraband is about illegally sneaking counterfeit money from Panama to America, via a big cargo ship (captained by J.K. Simmons). It has two things going for it: Mark Wahlberg, as Chris Farraday the caperer who’s compared to Harry Houdini, and a desperate trailer campaign that relied on stuffing a sizable helping of story-beats into its advertisement.
The film is an action drama based on the Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, directed by its lead actor Baltasar Kormakur, who kept the original locations when adapting it. The movie shifts its geography from Reykjavik and Rotterdam into New Orleans and Panama.
You know how it goes in movies: a botched smuggling job by Farraday’s inexperienced brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) sucks Farraday back into the biz. And no matter what he insists on, an unbending grin and the sparkle in his eyes, betrays his initial frustration of running this job. The grin, of course, fades away when Contraband starts whipping left, right and center in the film’s edgy second and third acts, introducing low-key, time-banded conflicts that may at time evoke a solid feel of existentialism to its characters – especially Farraday, Sebastian (Ben Foster) and Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi).
Contraband’s first 15 minutes were flat, as they introduced former Farraday and co. at a wedding reception. A stifled yawn later the screenplay by Arnaldur Indridason and Oskar Jonasson, fast-tracked straight into the caper bit, stringing up elements into a realistic short-form thriller with Wahlberg’s Farraday as its chief engine and Foster and Ribisi as fossil fuel.
Farraday’s choice of illegally imported goods is counterfeit money — as a family man, married (to Kate Beckinsale, playing Kate Farraday) — he has a personal policy against drugs. Foster, Farraday’s brother-like-friend, becomes an impromptu guardian of Kate and children in case Briggs tries to rough-house — which, being the jittery greased gangster he is, he does. There’s a level of destructiveness to both Sebastian and Briggs, which amplifies, sometimes with irrational and plain silly decision-making during the film’s mid-point, when Farraday leaves the ship to fetch the “funny money”.
Despite the slight dip, director Baltasar Kormakur’s indulgence in gritty atmosphere (mostly industrial in landscape and production design), zipping telephoto zooms, stark cuts and clearly manifesting film-grain brings a mature, almost welcoming authenticity to Contraband, that’s only heightened by the cast’s universally effective, pacified performance.
Contraband may not be as pop-corny as Pirates of the Caribbean but it is robust in its simplicity. Like so many heist films, it features people who are actually happy on their job — never mind the fact that they’re hoodwinking the government.
