Contraband (2012)

Contraband is a January action thriller, which is a genre designation that carries its own confession. Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a reformed smuggler in New Orleans who is pulled back for one last job when his brother-in-law botches a drug run and a man named Tim Briggs threatens the family. The film is a remake of the 2008 Icelandic picture Reykjavík-Rotterdam, though the specificity of that original has been sanded down into a Universal product with a cargo ship, a van of counterfeit bills, and a Jackson Pollock nobody can quite move. It opened at number one, which tells us more about the first two weeks of January than about the film itself.

The cultural ledger here is thin. Almost nothing on the screen asks to be read as a statement. There is no environmental sermon, no reconsideration of history, no economic critique of the criminals, who are simply criminals pursuing money. Kate Beckinsale's Kate is a wife in peril, knocked unconscious against a bathtub and parked in a foundation pour, and the film has no interest in granting her an arc or a grievance. The supporting cast includes Latino and Black actors, Diego Luna and Jason Mitchell among them, filling out the ensemble without ceremony. That is the extent of the film's inclusiveness, and it arrives as ordinary casting, not as an argument.

What remains is competence without conviction. The plot is convoluted, the heists are noisy, and the whole enterprise has the texture of something assembled from spare parts of better crime films. Ebert was tired of it. Travers said Wahlberg could sleepwalk through it, and allowed that he does. This reviewer cannot disagree. The film offers no instruction and takes no position. It simply traffics, and then it stops.

Return to the ledger and the page is nearly blank: a functioning genre machine that neither offends nor edifies, which is its own kind of achievement in a marketplace that increasingly demands a thesis. It is a movie about a man moving things he should not move, and it means nothing by it, and there is a certain relief in that, however minor.