DVD stay-away: CONTRABAND proves the hands-down dumbest movie of the year

Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur has made three very good movies in his home country (101 Reykjavík, The Sea and Jar City) and one that's pretty good (Inhale) and another that's truly godawful (CONTRABAND, out on DVD/Blu-ray this past week) here in the USA. (TrustMovies has not seen his earlier made-in-the-USA movie A Little Bit of Heaven so he can't speak for the quality of that one.) Rather than posit that the moviemaker is uncomfortable off his home base, I would instead suggest that Baltasar, shown below, ought not let go of the writing chores completely, as he has done with Contraband. (He either adapted or co-wrote his other films--except for Inhale--and his absence dearly shows.)

If Contraband were created (deliberately, that is) as a comedy, along the lines of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight or The Ladykillers, it might have worked. That would have taken some wit, however, which is in very short supply here. As is irony. Or humor of any kind. When everyone in a movie -- good guys, bad guys, even guys we don't give a shit about -- can't do a single thing correctly, we either start to laugh aloud, or soon give up on what quickly becomes an extremely stupid movie. Surely someone can do something right here? No, they can't. When they finally do (in the case of the lead character played by Mark Wahlberg, below left, with co-star Ben Foster), the results are so utterly unbelievably and simple-minded as to beggar imagination.

The movie looks good, however (Barry Ackroyd shot it) and moves fast, though not fast enough for its nearly two-hour running time. Locations are nice (New Orleans and Panama City), and the cast is filled with actors who ought to know better - from Kate Beckinsale to Giovanni Ribisi and Lukas Haas to Diego Luna. By the time this movie ends, given the stupidity on display, nobody -- good, bad or indifferent -- should still be alive. That they are is a monument to dumb, lazy screenwriting. Supposedly based on an original Icelandic film called Reykjavik-Rotterdam (a hit on its home turf that ran a mere 88 minutes and in which, coincidentally, filmmaker Kormákur starred as an actor but did not direct), this overblown excuse for a thriller simply embarrasses.

Contraband is out now on DVD and Blu-ray, for sale or rental, and is probably available on streaming of some sort. Check out the usual suspects if you insist on seeing it.