Contraband

For Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) life is good. He has a beautiful wife (Kate Beckinsale) and two sons, has a great best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster), and a blossoming new business. He has gone legit, no more running drugs, money, cars, anything from Panama into New Orleans. That is until he has to jump back in the game and run millions of counterfeit bills to protect his wife's brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) from druglord Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi).

A fantastic last 45 minutes of this movie made up for the first 65 minutes. The plot in the beginning was ridiculous. So many holes and not enough character development. The interactions amongst characters were limited to 1-2 minute clips here and there. Once the plan Farraday and his crew thought up is set in motion the movie starts to pick up, but still there is too much jumping around for me. It's not hard to follow, but it gets a little annoying to have to jump around so much.

But the last 45 minutes are incredible. This is where the jumping should occur. We should see some characters doing one thing and others doing another and never see the end of what they are doing. Then as the it begins to wrap up questions are answered and it's just great fun to watch.

It was hard to judge the acting at first, but as the characters have more screen time together the acting just gets better. (This, again, did not happen until late in the movie). Mark Wahlberg gives an emotionally charged performance, but the only emotion seen is his anger with his brother-in-law. Ben Foster is great, shining in a role he is used to playing. Kate Beckinsale, though we don't see much of her, brings some acting chops, just not enough for this action-drama. No one fit the role better than Giovanni Ribisi. He notoriously plays the sleazy evil character who always screws with everyone, but he does it very well. Except for his oddly mousy voice. That really bothered me.

This was a decently action packed movie, which I predict will do fairly well amongst the sometimes stuffy award nominees. Could have used more character development so we cared more about the people and what was happening to them and shouldn't have jumped around so much so early in the movie. Worth watching, but not necessarily in theaters.

6/10