'Contraband': Exciting, not original - Kansas City Star

Ah January, the dumping ground for low-budget horror flicks, Kate Beckinsale movies and remakes of foreign films you never knew existed.

Â"Contraband,Â" which stars Mark Wahlberg as a reformed smuggler making one last run from New Orleans to Panama, is a remake of a 2008 Icelandic thriller, Â"Reykjavik-Rotterdam.Â" ItÂ's directed by the original filmÂ's star, Baltasar Kormákur, who perhaps was not aware that if you cast Beckinsale as WahlbergÂ's wife, your film will be released in January.

The likable Wahlberg plays second-generation criminal Chris Farraday, a family man whoÂ's gone into the oh-so-ironic home security business, while his erstwhile business partner, Sebastian (Ben Foster), is going to AA meetings and furnishing his new bachelor pad.

But when ChrisÂ' pimply brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) botches his own little drug-smuggling operation, angering a psychotic dealer (Giovanni Ribisi of Â"AvatarÂ" fame), Chris — who would never smuggle something as audience-alienating as drugs — has to get back in the game for One Last Heist.

Chris and Sebastian were Â"the Lennon and McCartney of smuggling,Â" but ChrisÂ' simple plan to transport stacks of counterfeit $20s in a van inside a shipping container goes awry as soon as he and his accomplices arrive in Panama City. Among other obstacles, thereÂ's Diego Luna as a self-anointed drug kingpin who keeps wolves and boa constrictors as pets, and whose men simply wrap duct tape around their heads when theyÂ're robbing an armored car.

With Ribisi, Foster, Luna and Lukas Haas as one of WahlbergÂ's partners in crime, thereÂ's a whole lot of potential crazy in this cast, but the scenery is RibisiÂ's to chew in his amusing, wild-eyed way. (J.K. Simmons, relishing a thick NÂ'awlins drawl, also has his moments as the shipÂ's captain.)

The filmÂ's New Orleans is less touristy than usual, its shabby houses and grungy hotels posited as the rough equivalent of Â"The DepartedÂ'sÂ" Dorchester, Mass. The plot twists pleasurably in the final act, and the shipboard schemes give the familiar genre some novelty. But the final twist — the real big score — is a hoary joke, half-a-century old.

Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (Â"The Hurt Locker,Â" Â"United 93Â") shoots with his familiar zooming, handheld, multiple cameras, but Kormákur, best known for directing the 2000 Victoria Abril comedy Â"101 Reykjavík,Â" seems to favor helicopter shots of roads, bridges, highways — so frequent one expects to hear a traffic report — followed by a cut to the car on that road, establishing a visually monotonous pattern. ItÂ's pedestrian filmmaking, and this cast deserves better.

But when it comes down to it, these foreign filmmakers are really just remaking American movies, copying our generic tropes and selling them back to a Hollywood bankrupt of original ideas.

Beckinsale, whose fourth Â"UnderworldÂ" mo vie opens next Friday, may be hoping to score some of the cred accorded Amy Adams in Â"The FighterÂ" by streaking her hair and adopting a tough accent. Her character suffers myriad abuses while her husband is out of town. It may beat strutting around in a leather cape in that other vampire-vs.-werewolf franchise, but not by much.

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