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Created Jan 16, 2012 11:26PM PST • Edited Jun 16, 2019 03:17AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   High-powered action thrillers should all be this accomplished. Contraband smuggles a slyly clever plot, heavy-metal action and solid exploitation of an underexploited setting into theaters. A strong cast led by Mark Wahlberg is less a secret but no less an asset for this savvy crowd-pleaser.

   The heavy-metal action is the best since Unstoppable, the last action movie to adroitly use massive machinery – trains and rail-yards in Unstoppable, freighters and ports in Contraband. The merchant marine milieu perfectly supports a smuggling plot, offers gritty ports of call and is full of heavy-metal trappings. Rock on mate!

   Yes it’s formulaic. Yes it’s surreal. But accomplishment and a winning cast trump all. Contraband delivers.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Mark Walhberg’s easygoing style serves him well as a gentleman criminal gone straight. Luckily for him, the script calls for his character to make one upstandingly moral decision after another, notwithstanding that each has deadly consequences. The fact that his moral choices can be both obvious and felonious is because the movie’s rFactor pushes it well into surrealism.

   Highlights from the rest of the large cast:

   • Giovanni Ribisi makes a great villain, an essential element in an action movie. In fact, it’s a bit frightening how Ribisi inhabits such a cretinous low life.
   • Ben Foster is slickly effective as a twitchy wiseguy. Foster comes across as a second rate Ryan Gosling, albeit showing no signs of becoming the real thing.
   • Kate Beckinsale is a very good screen princess, but she ain’t no screen queen. IOW, her stardom ceiling is pretty low.
   • Caleb Landry Jones plays a doofus criminal like he is one. I guess that’s a compliment.
   • Lukas Haas seems oddly familiar. Oh yeah, he was the little kid in Witness.
   • J.K. Simmons improves any cast, here as a strutting merchant marine Captain.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Kudos to the team behind the camera, the same trio who made the Icelandic original. Yes, Icelandic! Director Baltasar Kormákur played Mark Wahlberg’s lead role, which was written by Arnaldur Indriðason and Óskar Jónasson, who directed Reykjavik-Rotterdam.

    You gotta love how their commitment to the marine setting extends to the very end, when they show us the bad seed in a prison-yard along the port canal, watching freighters head out to sea. Now that’s payoff.

    Contraband also brings to mind Point Blank in its hyper-crazed propulsive action.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    The story is superficially cliche: retired criminal gets forced into one more job to rescue an in-law who’s run afoul of his old running mates. Fortunately it is executed to perfection and includes plenty of twists to sprinkle moments of delight into the proceedings.

    It also cleverly reunites old comrades – including some who hate each other – at several plot points.

13. Music Great 4.0

    Sharp guitar lines, many blues and boogie inspired, jolt the film when action returns to the ship.

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.7

17. Sex Titillating 1.7

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.7

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.4

    The absurdly tight timing of Contraband’s capers and near fiascoes are surreal, the people survive beatings in downright supernatural fashion, and the heavy metal always glibly slips right into place. All in, that makes the rFactor Surreal.

    Surrealism aside, the setting highlights the globalization-enabling technology of containerization, without which modern supply chains would cease to exist.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.6

23. Biological Supernatural 3.1

    The sniveling bad guy gets his face pulverized by Wahlberg, yet ends up with just a bloody nose. Uh, that tips over to Supernatural.

24. Physical Glib 1.6

    Wahlberg has to save the day twice with a sledge hammer. The first involves a fully loaded ocean freighter fishtailing into port. Right…