Thursday, January 12, 2012

Contraband - 2 1/2 stars

Mark Wahlberg stars as a former smuggler who has decided to go legit. He now owns a security company, but when he was a smuggler, he was the best smuggler there was. There are a couple of scenes where he tells other smugglers how he pulled off an incredibly difficult job.

He is married and has two kids, but his wife's brother is trying to get into the game. When he gets into trouble with a local criminal, Wahlberg has to pull off one last job to save his brother-in-law.

I feel like I've seen this movie before. Will he successfully smuggle the contraband into the US and deliver it? Will he stop the bad guys from killing his family? Is there a surprise twist or two? I'm not calling this movie predictable, but ...

There are many scenes that are just completely implausible. One is where he is making a large hole in the ship he is working on. He manages to create this hole and conceal it with a panel while other crew members are around, and he could be discovered at any time, and it would take many guys a lot of hours to complete, and on and on. But he is able to do it in no time flat without ever being discovered.

There were also a lot of scenes where he just got lucky. He finishes concealing something, turns the corner, and a split second later the ship's captain comes around the corner. After a while I started to hope he got caught. He wasn't being careful so much as just counting on luck.

This isn't a bad movie, but there is nothing special about it. If you need something to go see tonight, you could do worse but you won't remember this movie a month from now.

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