Please, Seize This Ship

"Contraband"

Who remembers The Fighter?  It was the uplifting story of real life boxer Micky Ward.  He was a guy who was down on his luck both in life and in the ring and then turned his life around to become a champion.  The film came out in 2010, starred Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Amy Adams.  People remember this movie right?  I certainly do.  Not only did every actor in the film give a solid performance, but The Fighter also had a good script accompanied by some sound direction by David O. Russell.  I liked the film for these reasons and was pleasantly surprised to see that Wahlberg turned in a decent performance.  I thought maybe, just maybe he had turned over a new leaf and this would lead to a string of respectable films from the actor.  To my dismay, the film we get after The Fighter from him is the disappointingly standard, Contraband.

Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) used to be into some bad things with some pretty bad people.  Well now he has cleaned up his act and has a wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale,) and two boys.  He seems to be living a fairly content life as an installer of home security systems.  Chris soon finds out though that he and his family's security is about to be at risk.  Kate's little brother, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones,) is all kinds of mixed up in the world of drugs.  Andy's boss, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi) is none too pleased with him after he dumps a rather large shipment of cocaine overboard before it could be seized by U.S. Customs.  Briggs demands to be reimbursed for the destroyed shipment to the tune of $700,000 from Andy in two weeks or else Chris's family gets it.  Realizing what he has to do, Chris joins a crew aboard a cargo ship and runs contraband in order to buy a large sum of fake bills made in Panama.  He then must bring back the funny money into the United States in hopes of saving his family before it’s too late. 

A rather mundane premise leads to a series of humdrum sequences accompanied by stolid, profanity filled dialogue.  Let me make something clear though, I don't have a problem with a screenplay full of swears.  I think characters that drop bombs whether they be F or otherwise is fine, but only if there is a purpose.  To say, "Well, that's just how people talk," is a poor excuse.  The language has to feel organic to film.  Look at films like Casino, Magnolia, or Pulp Fiction, the strong pervasive language that is spoken throughout the duration of those flicks I believe remains consistent with a purpose and has a specific reason to be written as such.  For Contraband, it feels as though the screenwriters already knew they wanted to write an R-rated film so they threw in a bunch of swears.

Besides their potty mouths, these characters never seem to hold our attention long enough to actually care about them.  The actors involved I suppose are giving it their best.  Hey, maybe it's just the way their characters are written, right?  Part of me would like to believe that, but there's another part that thinks they're just phoning it in.  Perhaps if Beckinsale's character showed some toughness, like her character in the Underworld films, instead of acting as eye candy for the 18-30 males in the audience and further serving as a punching bag for Ribisi's generic bad guy character, possibly then she would gain my sympathies.  And then there's Wahlberg's character who inexplicably continues to bail out Kate's brother who makes one poor decision after another.  Oh, but he does it because they're family.  That is a theme that is a little too cut and dry for me given the mediocre screenplay.  Lastly, there’s the unnecessary added drama in the third act that is supposed to heighten the suspense and put more pressure on Wahlberg’s character, but actually the event feels tacked on and  needless.  

Poorly edited and amateurishly directed, Contraband has the feeling of a B-movie that should have gone straight to DVD.  I know Wahlberg is a household name and clearly the success of the film was hinging upon his stardom.  Overall though Contraband could have been a much more enjoyable and entertaining film had the script been written with some brains and the actors attempted to give us something more to their characters than what was just written as a vague description on the page.  Wahlberg's career choices continue to baffle me.  He's really all over the map.  Will households ever sit around and talk about how good of an actor he is, I doubt it.  Wahlberg got lucky with Three Kings, The Departed, and The Fighter.  Perhaps the best career decision he made was becoming friends with David O. Russell.  I want to truly like him as an actor but he has yet to fully prove that.  This Contraband should have been chucked overboard too.