Mark Walhlberg rises in a sluggish 'Contraband' - New York Daily News

Lukas Haas (l.), Mark Wahlberg (center), Caleb Landry Jones in "Contraband."

You can feel the working-class hero in almost every Mark Wahlberg performance. The product of a bruising South Boston upbringing, he brings a hardened reality to his physicality and the way he thinks through dilemmas. And in his latest, “Contraband,” Wahlberg makes sure backbone is never mixed with thuggishness.

But the rest of this grubby, strangely action-free movie, doesn’t follow his lead. Director Baltasar Kormakur’s drama overemphasizes its rusted-out atmosphere and slow-as-molasses storytelling. Only Wahlberg rises above the muck; everything else here feels buried in concrete.

Wahlberg plays Chris Faraday, a husband and father who has left behind his old life of running drugs and dirty money out of the ports of New Orleans. He was once in a team, with his laid-back pal Sebastian (Ben Foster), and when someone calls them “the Lennon and McCartney of smuggling,” it’s not clear who was a sellout and who may be sacrificed.

Chris is forced into making a leap back into the smuggling business when his young brother-in-law runs afoul of a weaselly crime boss named Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi). Getting himself and a small team onto the crew of a shipping freighter, Chris heads to Panama, pick up a load of cash and transports it illegally back to Louisiana for Briggs â€" who has a double-cross waiting when he returns.

This thrill-less trajectory folds in on itself partly because Kormakur has filled almost every supporting role with scrawny guys acting tough. Foster (“The Messenger”) sports scruff and sucks a toothpick, yet doesn’t come off as the badass he’s meant to be.

Meanwhile, Lukas Haas and Caleb Landry Jones provide some weak-arm protection for Wahlberg, and Ribisi, squawking lines in the same strangled voice he used to comic effect in “The Rum Diary,” makes for a particularly annoying villain. Every time he threatens Chris’ wife (Kate Beckinsale), we can associate with her look of annoyance.

Through it all, Wahlberg hangs tough. He proves again, as he did in “Three Kings,” “The Fighter” and “The Departed,” that in the right project, with the right surroundings, he’s the real deal.

If only “Contraband” â€" an Americanized re-do of a 2008 Icelandic thriller â€" surrounded him with opponents who deserved his straightforward threats and don’t-mess-with-me attitude. And it might have helped if this ashy, industrial movie didn’t look like it was filmed almost entirely inside a trash compactor.

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