Contraband

By the time the van was hijacked, I was just checking off boxes in which I’d written the characters and situations I'd seen elsewhere. Not that it's any different from that point on, but then the protagonists are in real trouble and it starts to take on the kind of gradation you expect from a genre film like this. It gets bonus points for the well-used handheld camera, but I take some away for the characters, which, except for Wahlberg's, lack a better profile. 3 ½. [I won't remember the film in a week.] (13/04/2012)

Baltasar Kormákur quite often commutes between his native country – Iceland – and America, where they are happy to invest not only money into his films but also provide interesting actors. Hats off for what he has been able to do over the years because few European directors can commute like him every other year. It’s just a pity that Contraband didn’t interest me at all in the story. Mark Wahlberg plays a classic badass, whom you just have to look in the face and it’ll be clear to you what will happen in the next few seconds. But all that contraband is a process that flew completely over my head. Whether it’s the guy who fucked it all up (that one in particular) or the plan with the money and transporting it. Anyway, I admit that it was filmed very well. And the fact that the camera is shaking here and there, in this case, doesn’t really hurt. It wasn’t that bad. (16/10/2015)

A harsh Nordic wind blew in Hollywood and warmed to room temperature with lightning speed. A boring family drama about a man who is a criminal but a good dad and a husband, an overcomplicated heist (the film could represent this very characteristic in the dictionary of adjectives), and a simple morality, from which something as idiotic as stealing will eventually pay off, and it's cool. Kormákur is a solid director, Contraband has a few solid scenes, but otherwise it's a scary example of how Drive might have ended up if Refn didn't direct it. Just a forgettable spectacle, in which you will forget about the typically Nordic way of filming "over obstacles" and eternal raw refocusing. Form has no chance of slowing down this naive thing. The Icelander simply failed to keep a rough face and submitted to the mainstream. Futility. (09/01/2012)

Decent craftwork with some excellent moments. Wahlberg’s acting has become bearable, Foster gives a standard performance and Ribisi really enjoys playing that sneaky asshole. The nearer it gets to the end, the more creaky it is, but so what? The main thing is that it’s fun! The entertainment value is constant. (27/08/2012)

Standard stuff. The main shootout is not great, the camera is bad, the story is solid, but the execution and theme are basically average, sometimes even trashy. During the introduction, I hoped that the Miami Vice-style setup wouldn't be just a few initial shots, that there would be a lot of similarly perfectly tuned elements throughout the film, but that was not the case, unfortunately. There are a few bright moments, but otherwise, it's just average, pure and simple, with Wahlberg playing his typical tough guy again. (06/06/2012)

The audience will once again wonder if Mark Wahlberg can act. The accent he has, which is apparently Bostonian, sounds like a foreigner, perhaps from France or maybe Russia, in some scenes. Mark definitely has charisma, but sometimes he ruins it by forgetting to act. The emotions he expresses in some moments of the film seem pre-fabricated and almost robotic. In the film "Contraband," he played a former thief who is now reformed and has a family, but because of one of his family members, his brother-in-law, he is forced to save a life by getting involved in something illegal again. Lately, we have seen a flood of similar films. Where does Contraband fit in? Probably somewhere between "The Italian Job" and "Man on the Edge". The first one mentioned is the most well-crafted of the three, the second the least. "Contraband" is somewhere in between. Some performances in this film are truly excellent (Ben Foster, Kate Beckinsale, and of course Giovanni Ribisi, who is not funny for a moment, on the contrary, he is in a role we usually don't know him for and he is great), but Wahlberg is definitely not the one carrying it. The story is quite simple and we don't get any masterful planning, but it flows quite well, although some of the action scenes are a bit shallow and inserted just for the sake of being action-packed. However, don't expect anything groundbreaking here. It's simply a fairly well-made heist film that cannot compete with "Ocean's Eleven", but when you can't find it at your video store, this is an acceptable substitute. Considering the original film "From Reykjavik to Rotterdam" was not even 90 minutes long, this American version is a bit stretched out. More: http://www.filmovy-denik.cz/2012/07/mistrovsky-plan-nerdi-bel-ami-susi.html (24/02/2013)