#CONTRABAND CAST MOVIE#

Despite the fact that he’s entering a very nasty world, populated with very nasty people, there’s never a sense that Chris is in any way compromised himself. Contraband is constructed like something of a noir film – a good man is forced to do a bad thing to protect his family – but there’s none of that ambiguity around the central character and his smuggling. However, I can’t help but feel that the somewhat convoluted plotting does belie an overly simplistic moral compass. Contraband is never boring, even if it does tend to detour quite a bit.

Even lifting a cargo crate on to a ship becomes a life-and-death situation. It seems like Kormákur doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to constructing a thriller – if there’s an opportunity to put the audience on the edge of their seats, he takes it. Kormákur handles the tension and suspense quite well, as our lead finds himself tied up in several near misses with the authorities, and in several risky situations. It knows we’re familiar with these conventions and plays them briskly, in order to get straight to the actual smuggling.

#CONTRABAND CAST MOVIE#

In fairness, the movie doesn’t mess around. In order to help his brother-in-law out, Chris embarks on one last haul, hoping to make enough money to square things and – you guessed it – get out of the life completely. Chris’ brother-in-law ends up severely in debt to a local drug dealer. Naturally, as seems to be obligatory in a film like this, things go wrong. Sebastian Abney, his brother in all but blood, is running a construction company, and enjoying the existence of a wealthy bachelor. Chris Farraday is now a family man working a decent job installing alarm systems, putting his ingenuity to work in a legal manner. We’re introduced to “the Lennon and McCartney of smuggling”, two veteran players who”got outta the life” and seem to be living decent and respectable existences. It feels like we might have been better served by diving into the smuggling aspect in more depth, rather than getting diverted down tangents.Īnd, to be fair, most of it is quite interesting. Still, there have been relatively mainstream thrillers covering the art of illegal smuggling, so Guzikowski has some fertile ground to plow. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the sudden genre switch, and it succeeds at keeping the audience off balance, even if it does feel a little random. I say “nominally” because things come off the rails in the middle of the film, with it briefly transforming into a gangster and heist movie before reverting back. Contraband is nominally a movie about smuggling.

Contraband cast