Contraband

Director: JA Bayona
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Giovanni Ribisi
Time Out rating:
Japanese title: Hard Rush

Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) used to be the go-to smuggler: drugs, money, drugs and money – there wasn't anything he couldn't get from one border to another with a minimum of fuss. Those days are over: now Chris is a New Orleans family man with a wife (Kate Beckinsale, in supportive-spouse purgatory between Underworld installments), two kids and a legitimate job as a security-system installer. But then his deadbeat brother, a much less-adept smuggler, tosses a cocaine load belonging to Chris's psycho former colleague (Giovanni Ribisi). Just when he thought he was out...

What follows is a convoluted bit of hogwash involving a Panama-bound cargo ship, several crates' worth of counterfeit moolah, gun-toting gangsters led by a posturing Diego Luna and an ill-treated Jackson Pollock canvas. Contraband looks and feels like something Entourage's Vincent Chase and his posse might have come up with after binging on Michael Mann flicks (an impromptu armoured-truck heist even cribs shamelessly from Heat). It's mostly watchable: Icelandic director Baltasar Kormkur (Jar City, Inhale) keeps things moving at a brisk clip, Wahlberg is his usual charmingly befuddled self, and the unsurprisingly terrible Ribisi – doing a gangland variation on his mentally challenged romantic in The Other Sister – has much less screen time than threatened in pre-release promotions. But none of that changes the fact that the movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.

Contraband opens at nationwide on June 15