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Jan 12, 201275A thriller with its share of nail-biting moments.
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75Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that's recommendation enough.
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Jan 16, 201270The result is that rare Hollywood genre film that earns its intensity rather than forcing it upon you.
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Jan 12, 201270It's still an obligingly tense, scruffy addition to the one-last-crime genre.
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70It's a genre film, not great art, though there's a good joke about art - a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough - but it's a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.
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70The interplay between Wahlberg and Foster and then Ribisi is nicely done but the action in and around the cargo ship is where the movie's real fun lies. There is plenty of guy humor.
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67Kormákur and his collaborators want to tell a simple story cleanly, efficiently, and with a refreshing dearth of frills. They more or less realize their aspirations because they aim so low.
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67Contraband is a tidy little thriller that makes up in execution what it lacks in originality.
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63Watching it leaves you feeling less buzzed than jittery and slightly nauseated. If the "Ocean's" movies were martinis, Contraband is a thermos full of coffee.
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63What we're left with is a movie that is about as nourishing as the Junior Mints and nachos available at the theater snack bar. But, then, many a Friday night dinner has been made of far less.
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63Playing a blonde with her roots showing, Beckinsale seems up for a scrap, but the film gives her nothing to do but get clobbered.
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63There's a frothy, almost whimsical undercurrent quietly bubbling beneath the dead-serious story, and it finally bursts to the forefront in the ridiculously happy finale, which argues without the slightest bit of shame that crime sometimes does pay - really, really well.
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63Wahlberg has the presence, the glower and the laconic line readings to guide us through a mess of pain, painlessly.
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63I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.
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60Don't expect glamorous outlaws, sunny locales and exotic masterplans – this low-key thriller lifts the rusted lid off an all-too-real world of despairing criminality.
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60Two winter-season entertainments -- "Haywire" and Contraband with the minimalist but inexorable Mark Wahlberg -- have no greater ambition than to engage our dreams of behaving badly. Of the two, Contraband is the more absorbing. [30 Jan. 2012, p.79]
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60So super complicated (implausible?) that in the wrong hands it would be laughable. Instead, this very gritty bit of greased action does a decent job of shaking the sluggish out of January.
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60The absurdity of the story in the largely thrill-free thriller Contraband, its hairpin twists and outrageous coincidences, may keep even hungry action fans away. That's too bad because the story doesn't matter. (It rarely does.)
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60The kind of middling-but-watchable heist thriller that, days after seeing it, already feels like something you caught half of on a plane two years ago.
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60Ribisi has become the go-to guy for movie psychos, giving everything to performances like this one or as Moburg, the dissolute reporter in "The Rum Diary."
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60This Americanized version of the 2008 Nordic thriller "Reykjavik Rotterdam" transfers the original's gritty, violent action into an entertaining and intense starring role for Mark Wahlberg.
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60The lead role of a working class former smuggler who dirties his hands again to save his family fits Mark Wahlberg like a glove.
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60This solid if disposable genre exercise maintains a hard-driving line of action and a commitment to one-damned-thing-after-another storytelling that carries it past any number of narrative speedbumps and preposterous detours.
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60No one, however, could mistake Contraband for anything but what it is: a shift-job genre movie - not a bad day's work, content to match the blocky trudge of its star rather than attempt panache.
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55Nothing about it lingers, not even the sulfuric stench of a bum scene or a particularly hammy performance.
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50Wahlberg could sleepwalk through this role, and does. See this movie and you'll surely follow his lead.
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50Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.
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50Contraband has a few moments of tension, but it adheres to a predictable heist formula hardly worth trafficking in.
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50A big comedown from "The Fighter," Contraband finds Wahlberg in default mode: With his Popeye biceps and broody stares, the actor can do a character like Chris without even thinking about it - and that's what he does here.
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50Contraband is the kind of thriller that offers just enough in the way of effective elements to assemble a two-minute trailer. When it comes to a 110-minute feature, however, the sketchiness of the plotting and the director's lack of sure-handedness sink the project.
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50Contraband is based on an Icelandic thriller named "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," which leads you to suspect that neither New Orleans nor Panama City is particularly essential to the plot. That film starred Baltasar Kormakur, who is the director of this one, perhaps as a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.
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40It's a thriller in which the twists become so absurd that it becomes a kind of caper, but without the humour.
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40The movie amounts to little more than Marky Mark's South American Vacation.
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40Only Wahlberg rises above the muck; everything else here feels buried in concrete.
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30It's exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood specializes in, the kind which seems on paper as if it ought to be entertaining, but winds up a massive and chaotic drag.
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25Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.
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12Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.
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Jan 12, 201210Several graphically violent scenes of women and children in jeopardy make this, ultimately, beneath contempt.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 39
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Mixed: 12 out of 39
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Negative: 7 out of 39
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Contraband is a cool crime movie. It is fun, dark, and suspenseful. Mark Whalberg has a great future ahead of him.
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5
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