In short: Contraband (2012)

Once, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg), was the best smuggler there was. By now, he has retired to the more bourgeois wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids stuff, working as the owner of a security tech firm. Unfortunately, his wife’s little brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) is attempting to step into his old comfy smuggling shoes, which works well enough until he has to drop a load of drugs into the sea to avoid it and him falling into the hands of the coast guard. Not surprisingly, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), the guy whose drugs these were, isn’t at all happy. Why, he’s giving Andy only a couple of days to come up with quite a bit of money. Otherwise, Andy’s dead, and going by Briggs’s logic, his debts will fall on his wife and her family.

Because he can’t find any other way to come up with the money, and because he’s certainly not going to let his brother in law get killed by a raving lunatic, Chris decides to make one last big smuggling run. It’s the sort of smuggling run where whatever could go wrong does indeed go wrong, so he has to fight the vagaries of a really rude ship’s captain (J.K. Simmons doing his thing), work with unreliable contacts, take part in an impromptu armoured car assault, and so on and so forth. That’s all before we come to various betrayals on the home front, mind you.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Contraband is the sort of everything and the kitchen sink thriller that you’ll either loathe with a passion for its various crimes against plausibility and coherent writing or sort of enjoy because it is decently entertaining for what it is. It is certainly a film absolutely disinterested in emphasizing the more interesting parts of its narrative - which could turn this into a gut-wrenching film about betrayals, people falling back to their worst selves in case of danger, and the inability to ever escape the past – in favour of spending most of its time adding one bizarre complication after the other, with a side-line in a particularly yawn-inducing version of ye olde family under threat subplot.

As a member of the order of forgettable popcorn cinema, thriller division, the film isn’t without merit, though, for while only very few of the complications in the path of Marky Mark (who makes all the facial expressions a serious actors makes when tasked with a silly thriller, don’t you worry, and only half phones his performance in) make much sense, there’s something to be said to the film’s repeated shrugging of its shoulders, mumbling “whatever”, and throwing a quick security van heist or whatever other nonsense just came to mind in. It is certainly never boring, though not quite coherent enough in tone, style and pacing to be as fun as it could be. The regular popping in with the indignities Beckinsale’s character has to go through doesn’t help with the latter much, particularly since the film never gives her anything more to actually do than be the helpless wife. And I’ve seen more interesting examples of those too.


Ribisi and Ben Foster as Wahlberg’s traitorous best friend put some enthusiastic efforts in, at least, and the action is competent and fun enough to watch. Just don’t expect to remember anything about Contraband a couple of weeks after you have seen it.

In short: The Gift (2000)

As a widow with three kids somewhere in the rural South of the USA, Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) doesn’t have a particularly easy life. She’s earning a living as a clairvoyant, though in her particular case, this means she is a combination of amateur social worker and amateur psychologist, helping people in her community who’d never seek or find professional help with kindness and empathy as best as she can. There’s for example Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank) who is regularly abused by her prick of a husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves), despite Annie telling her again and again she should pack up and leave; or the local car mechanic Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), whom she is trying to help confront some deeply buried trauma that is breaking him apart inside.

Annie does have actual psychic powers, mind you. Dreams and visions do tend to tell her things, and right now, those visions are telling her there’s trouble on the horizon, though it’s unclear what kind of trouble it is. The only thing that’s sure is that it’s going to be bad.

Say what you will against Sam Raimi (we all have suffered through that thing with Kevin Costner, and various odious comic relief outings by his brother Ted, after all), but the man has always been more than just a one-trick pony, by now showing a filmography that manages to be diverse in tone and style yet still showing a consistent world view and a personal touch.

So, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that his Southern - mildly gothic and supernatural - thriller The Gift shows a filmmaker who is just as accomplished at making a character-focused film without any big set-pieces or much blood as he is when concerning himself with Bruce Campbell’s blood-spattering adventures or Spider-Man.

While its plot about guilt, murder, and ghosts isn’t terribly original – these things are what we expect in the South to happen right? - The Gift thrives on two things. Firstly, it carries a deep sense of place, turning what could be cliché South into something that lives and breathes like an actual place (from my chair in Germany I wouldn’t dare suggest an authentic depiction of the South, mind you), built up by Raimi through often surprisingly subtle framing choices and a direction style that always emphasises the bits of scenery that tell us about the place they belong to without the film ever actually pointing it out.

Secondly, there’s the acting ensemble. It’ll come as no surprise that Blanchett is pretty damn great, turning a character that could be your usual caricature medium right out of a mediocre TV show into a believable woman - in turns fragile, strong, sad, and nearly painfully compassionate without ever feeling like a sugary saint. On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be a little bit shocked by seeing Keanu Reeves do that thing I never thought he could do: act, and quite convincingly thanks to the magic casting someone against type can produce.

All of which leaves us with a calmly accomplished film that is unspectacular only in theory but in practice can knock off a pair of socks or two.