A decade ago, a caper like Contraband might have been in line for a fashionably
fragmentary narrative treatment – so why not now?
Straight and narrow … Contraband tells its story in a convenational narrative.
It’s a berth on the USS Contemporary all the way for Mark Wahlberg in his new
thriller Contraband, with its story about the counterfeit-money supply lines between
Panama and the United States. In fact, the film is a testament to the glories of (above
board) free trade: once known as 2008 Icelandic production Reykjavik-Rotterdam,
this piece of intellectual property has crossed the Atlantic with star Baltasar
Kormákur, who, as the new film’s director, ushered it smoothly into the Hollywood
warehouse.
Contraband is a solid enough 110 minutes, a bit like a lengthy episode of the Crystal
Maze set in a sweating central American metropolis overseen by some crazed UPS
official. But its feverish overplotting made me think it had missed a trick. It might
have benefitted from stringing together some elegant non-linear connections, like Traffic and Syriana, with whom it shares a fascination with international
logistics.