Contraband (Universal, Relativity Media, Working Title Films, 2011, released 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched another item from our DVD backlog, a 2012 movie called Contraband which I suspect came from the same batch of DVD close-outs as the film we’d watched the night before, Brian De Palma’s 1993 Carlito’s Way. Though 18 years separated them (Carlito’s Way was made in 1993 and Contraband in 2011, the copyright date, though imdb.com’s page dated it a year later), there were some striking similarities between the two films. Both of them are about former criminals who get drawn back into the criminal lifestyle despite their desire to get out of it, and both are led back in by incompetent family members whose own walks on the wild side get them in deadly trouble. In Carlito’s Way it was the central character’s young cousin who got involved in drug smuggling despite his total incompetence; in Contraband it’s Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), brother-in-law of Chris Ferriday (Mark Wahlberg, top-billed), who as the film opens is in a boat ferrying cocaine across the Gulf of Mexico to its destination in New Orleans, where the film begins and ends – only U.S. Customs agents intercept the boat and are about to board it when, to save himself, Andy dumps several million dollars’ worth of coke off the boat.

Only the people who hired him to smuggle the stuff into the U.S. are understandably upset and send an enforcer named Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi – who far out-acts Wahlberg, but then in this sort of story the villains are usually more interesting than the heroes), who threatens to kill everyone in Chris’s family – Andy, his sister (and Chris’s wife) Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and Chris’s and Kate’s two kids – unless Chris comes up with $7 million to repay the coke gang’s losses. Chris is a former smuggler who became legendary in his criminal world for smuggling in a Ferrari piece by piece and sending an agent to buy just the outer body shell at a customs auction, then reassembling the parts and delivering the now-complete car to his buyer (which reminded me of movie mogul Sam Goldwyn’s early days in the glove business and his trick for avoiding import duties on his gloves: he’d divide the pairs, load all the left-hand gloves in one shipment and the right-hand gloves in another, his agents would buy them at auction since no one else was interested, and then he’d put the pairs back together and sell them). Mostly, though, Chris dealt in drugs, but he’s well and truly out of that life now and wants to make an honest living and keep himself, his wife and his kids out of trouble. Except that Briggs’ demands and threats lead him back into it, and in particular to an elaborate plan to hire himself out on a container freighter which will pass through the Panama Canal. There he will contact an old associate who has a line on $7 million in counterfeit U.S. money, which he will use to pay off Briggs, only his plan goes awry. First he finds out that the money he thought would pass won’t – he drips iodine on it and it stains the paper. “You didn’t use starch-free paper!” he says – and he’s told that a crazy gang leader named Gonzalo (Diego Luna) now owns the operation that produces the credible counterfeit money he was counting on.

There’s a race against time as Chris’s men on the ship try to sabotage it so its normal seven-hour passage through the Panama Canal (the canal’s design incorporated Gatún Lake, a mountain lake several miles above sea level, so the canal incorporates two sets of three locks each to raise the ship passing through it to the level of Gatún Lake and then lower it back to sea level so it can re-enter ocean waters) gets even longer and allows Chris to drive the mini-van containing the money back to the ship and load it into one of the freight containers. Only Andy (ya remember Andy?), whom Chris inexplicably entrusted with the belt of real money with which he intended to buy the counterfeit stuff, gets a blackmail call from Briggs insisting that he’s tracked down Kate and Chris’s kids to a game and will kill them immediately unless Andy uses the money to buy a drug shipment and smuggle it in along with the phony money. This means that Chris doesn’t have the real money to pay Gonzalo, so he has to accept Gonzalo’s job offer to drive a truck and block the way of an armored car so Gonzalo and his men can hijack its contents – though when the deal goes down Gonzalo and most of his gang are killed in a shoot-out with customs officials and the armored car contains nothing more than an old piece of canvas Chris assumes is just a tarp. Chris takes it and barely gets himself, his men and his cargo back on board the freighter in time – the freighter is run by the hard-nosed Captain Camp (J. K. Simmons), who when Chris signed on assigned him the most menial tasks he could think of, including cleaning and scouring the ship’s floors.

Meanwhile, Chris entrusted the safety of his wife and kids to Sebastian Abney (Ben Foster, the sexiest guy in the film’s cast), a friend and fellow A.A. member who really [spoiler alert!] is in league with Briggs – and as a symbol of his moral degradation does a spectacular back-flio off the wagon and in the later part of the film is shown not only drinking but doing coke. Eventually Chris manages to get out of his predicament by giving the drugs to the bad guys – including Briggs, Sebastian and Captain Camp, who wasn’t upset that Chris was using his ship to smuggle stuff but that he hadn’t asked his permission and arranged for him to receive a cut – by turning them over in Captain Camp’s home and then calling the customs agents on them, and he finds a buyer not only willing to pay him $3 million in real money for the $7 million in counterfeit, but who reveals that the “tarp” is actually a Jackson Pollock original painting, stolen from a Panama museum, that’s valued officially at $140 million and Chris’s contact can fence it for $20 million. Contraband was actually based on a 2008 Icelandic movie called Reykjavík-Rotterdam which was co-written and directed by Óskar Jónasson (his writing partner was Arnaldur Indriòason) and starred Baltasar Kornakúr in the Mark Wahlberg role; for the U.S. remake Kornakúr was promoted to director and Aaron Guzikowski wrote the U.S. screenplay based on the Icelandic original.

I had a similar reaction to Contraband as I’d had to Carlito’s Way: I didn’t think it was a great movie but it was a quite good workmanlike piece of entertainment, and I especially liked the almost Hitchcockian ambivalence in which the filmmakers had us rooting for the criminals in their battle against even worse criminals – to the point where we don’t want to see the Customs agent bust Mark Wahlberg and his associates. Wahlberg turns in one of his usual deadpan performances – why he and not his older brother Donnie (less sexy but a considerably more interesting actor who does justice to a morally complex character on the TV police series Blue Bloods) became the big star of the family is something of a mystery – and Beckinsale is O.K. in a part that’s mostly a pretty typical damsel in distress. At one point I joked that Beckinsale wished she were still in the Underworld movies, where she was playing a vampire and therefore would have powers to defend herself and her family against the thugs who were trying to kill them. Charles liked Contraband less than I had,though at least he gave the writers points for avoiding one of his pet peeves in movies: the money (real or fake) was actually depicted as occupying the amount of space it really would. He’s tired of movies in which a character is carrying a small satchel full of cash and we’re told it’s $1 million when that much money would be far bulkier. Btu he questioned whether there was enough action for the movie buffs who like to see people shoot each other and blow things up on screen – there was some of that but he wondered where there was enough of it to suit that sort of moviegoer. I enjoyed Contraband for what it was, and I particularly liked the fact that we weren’t observing the characters like lab rats but were actually encouraged to identify with Chris Ferriday and his family as they tried to extricate themselves out of the pickle that dumb brother of hers had put them in!