Old smuggler

It's an old story that keeps getting repeated in gangster movies: a criminal has given up his life of crime and settled down to a 'normal' life until some circumstance forces him back 'for one last run on the fast train'.

Contraband
Reliance Home Video/Universal, Rs. 599
Rating: **1/2

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It's an old story that keeps getting repeated in gangster movies: a criminal has given up his life of crime and settled down to a 'normal' life until some circumstance forces him back 'for one last run on the fast train'. In this 2012 American remake of the 2008 Icelandic film Reykjavík-Rotterdam, Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, an ex-smuggler now living the happy life with wife and two kids and installing security systems in houses. All this goes for a toss as he learns that his young brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), who was in a botched-up drug smuggling, is being threatened by the mobster Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), who wants repayment. The kind of money required to pay Briggs back isn't possible through any honest job. So Chris is cajoled to do one last job.

Wahlberg fits the role of a reluctant ex-criminal returning to his game and the fact that he still feels the thrill of it is palpable. But it's Ribisi's maniacal performance as a no-holds-barred cretinous villain that provides an edge to an otherwise run-of-the-mill action thriller. Director Baltasar Kormákur played Wahlberg's lead role in the original movie. The story's transposition to New Orleans leads to much Hollywood-tailored dilution. But we do get a ringside view of the cogs and wheels that operate the grittier, dirtier side of crime.