The Grey

            I really need to finish my paper on why movie trailers piss me off so often.  I hate that production companies will completely mislead the viewer into thinking a movie is like A, when in reality, it's like B, but they don't know how to sell B.  Instead of trying to be honest, they'll just cut some footage until everyone thinks they're going to see A.  It's not like they give a shit once they've got your money.

            For example:  Adventureland.  Have you seen it?  I love the movie, but it's no light-hearted coming-of-age comedy.

            There are plenty of examples, and I'll break things down a lot more when I write the specific "I hate these damn trailers so damn much damnit" article.

            On to the review!

            The Grey was my movie of the week, and I feel that it's an appropriate movie to close out January with.  Lots of people are looking out there windows to the view of snow everywhere, so a movie about what happens when you're unprepared for the wilderness feels perfectly timed.  Unfortunately this particular movie, despite all its positives, is fatally flawed.

            There are about a dozen great, fantastic, amazing, fun, entertaining, thrilling elements to The Grey, and I will try to cover them all.  However, there are two elements that prevent this film from being something that could have contended for an Oscar in November or December.  Melodrama and special effects.

            Before I get to those, however, let's go over the basics.  The Grey stars Liam Neeson as Ottway, a man who has absolutely given up.  He has found himself on the edge of the world, guarding oil pipeline workers from wolves as they work in the Northern wilderness.  By wilderness, they really mean it.  A flight south to Anchorage looks like it takes 8+ hours.

            Of course, this being a shitty but decently-paying job, all of his coworkers are losers, jokers, drifters and ex-cons.  The sort of people who don't do well in structured environments but are still competent enough to get a job done if there's money involved.

            So it's no surprise that, when the plane crashes while taking a load of workers to Anchorage for some down time, Ottway is not only the most prepared to survive, but the only one who has any clue.  He finds himself with six other men who range in emotion from scared to scared shitless, all of whom are sick or injured in some way.  Plus, there are wolves.

            You see, they may have crashed close enough to a wolf's den that the wolves are not going to back down.  Instead, they may harass the group of survivors until they're all either 30-300 miles further away, or dead.  Dun-dun-duuuuuun!

            But therein lies one of my problems.  The Grey doesn't really need wolves in the first place.  In fact, I imagine this is how the pitch went:

            "Sir, have we got a movie for you.  Man vs. Nature.  A group of survivors crash-land in the Alaskan wilderness and have to try and survive an arctic winter while searching for civilization.  Plus, Liam Neeson agreed to be the lead for it."

            "Man vs. Nature, you say?  What sort of nature?"

            "Well, we've got blizzards, illness, injuries, snow and below freezing temperatures.  hypothermia, altitude sickness--"

            "Wolves."

            "Sir?"
            "Wolves.  Do you have wolves."

            "Well, they were going to play a minor role, since it is an arctic winter, we figured the men would be frightened and maybe hounded by some wolves."

            "No, I want these motherfucking wolves everywhere.  I want Liam Neeson to have to kill a goddamn wolf every time he takes a piss in this movie."

            "But sir, that really wasn't what we had in mind.  I mean, we were going for something like 127 Hours or Cast Away, you know, where it's just man and damn near no other living creature?"

            "Yeah, but that's some pussy shit.  Now come over here and help me snort all this coke."

            "Yes sir!  Pleasure doing business with you sir."

            And that's the story of how The Grey got too many wolves in it.  Which still wouldn't be too bad, except the wolves look fucking terrible.  When they're running they are terribly poor CGI, and when they're walking or standing still they are an equally-terrible animatronics.  You can't lose yourself to the movie when the antagonists aren't even as realistic as the kids in the It's A Small World ride.

            As for the melodrama, the film seems to recognize that and change course about thirty minutes into the movie, but it comes back with a vengeance towards the end.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first few minutes will test your patience.  It is nothing but drama and self-loathing, with woe-is-me voiceover work and just an incredible amount of heaviness in every scene.

            Once the plane goes down, everyone is too busy for flashbacks and monologues.  At least, until we've whittled down the survivors a little bit.  Then the drama starts to pile on again, adding too many layers to the tension.  Throw in the fact that they kept randomly ignoring the weather around them when it was convenient, and I remained just annoyed enough with the film to really lose myself in it. 

            By ignoring the weather, I mean how they complain about the weather in one scene, or comment on how they need fire or blankets or whatnot, only to ignore those needs the next night.  Plus the fact that everyone leaves their face uncovered despite the fact that, by the movie's own admission, frostbite would have taken everyone's damn nose and ears.  Add a scene where someone completely ignores a situation where death by hypothermia is the real world outcome and you've got me just irritated enough to stay grounded in the real world.

            Now, I've complained enough about what I didn't like, but I did say I really enjoyed The Grey.  The elements that I loved were plentiful.  The acting was excellent, and I enjoyed Liam Neeson when he wasn't in woe-is-me mode.  There were some amazingly brilliant lines of dialog and monologues.  The conversations and emotions felt natural, and you could imagine this is exactly how seven people would act and react in this situation.  There were a few moments of genuine thrill and terror where you truly did not know what was going to happen on screen. 

            I think only The Thing compares to just how much the weather can be a factor when you're trying to survive so far north, but of course that antagonist is a little less believable than wolves.  Like I said, I really liked The Grey, and I would recommend it highly.  I'll go so far as to say that I enjoy it more than The Edge, a similar hunted-by-animal(s) survival thriller, and state that it's much better than the Flight of the Phoenix remake.  (I have, sadly, never seen the original, so I cannot compare the two.)  All in all, The Grey is a perfectly fine dramatic thriller.  You just have to get through the first thirty minutes and then pretend that the wolves aren't absolutely ridiculous looking.

Underworld: Awakening puts me to sleep

            Once in a great while a movie comes out that can be predicted wholly without even stepping foot in a theater.  Just by watching the trailer, you will know exactly how the entire plot unfolds, who may or may not live through it, the types of adversity the main character is going to face, and just how stupid everything is going to be.

            That once in awhile has occurred, and its name is Underworld: Awakening.

            On to the review!

            There’s not really too much to say about the fourth Underworld film.  I will admit that I haven’t seen any of the second and only parts of the third while waiting to take a urinalysis (hooray military!).  I will also argue that I missed nothing.

            Underworld: Awakening begins by filling us in on what we ‘missed.’  Apparently humanity now knows that there are Vampires and werewolves..sorry, Lycans…and they’re pretty keen on destroying the shit out of both ‘evil’ races.  Unfortunately it’s not enough to make our heroine react to mankind’s kneejerk reaction to blow everything up.  No, that might lead to something icky like a moral quandary.  Instead we’re going to add a bunch of terrible plot twists.

            Instead, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her half-Lycan-half-Vampire boyfriend are about to get on a boat to leave England behind and start anew somewhere else.  Somalia, maybe?  I hear they’ve got relatively few Lycan/Vampire sanctions.  Before they can cast off, however, the humans knock out Selene and her boyfriend (Michael Corvin, played by Scott Speedman, I think.  His role is so small IMDB doesn’t even credit him).

            Flash-forward a dozen years and Patient Two has just awoken Patient One from cryogenic sleep.  Now, if I tell you that Patient One is Selene, can you guess who Patient Two is?  What if I tell you that it’s not the boyfriend?  Unfortunately, I figured out exactly who was who in about 3 seconds, leaving me free to laugh at the utter stupidity of the characters on screen as they deal with their surroundings.  Every single situation the movie puts them in could honestly be solved by my 4 year old niece if I gave her the same amount of information the characters had.

            I can’t go into the rest of the movie without ruining what little surprises it pretends to offer, but I can confidently say that they’re all pretty bad.  You have your usual skeptics, last-minute help and heroic battle that telegraphs how it’s going to end about five minutes before it actually does. 

            The special effects genuinely try, but are found lacking.  I ponied up the extra money to see it in 3D and discovered that you don’t need to watch this in 3D.  The Lycans always look a little bit too CGI and what blood and gore there is tends to be over the top and silly, rather than adding any amount of realism to the fights. 

            “But what about the acting?” you ask.

 “Get the fuck out of my house,” would be my reply.

 Seriously, there have been 3 Underworld movies before this one.  The acting was shitty in the one and a half that I saw, and I’m sure it was just as shitty in the other one and a half.  It didn’t get any better.  This could have been a silent film with about 10 sentences worth of subtitles and I would still have understood the entire plot.

            All in all, Underworld: Awakening is a predictable, poorly CGI’d, poorly acted action movie.  If you’re absolutely starving for some mindless werewolf/vampire homicide, then this is really all you have to tide you over until I finish my current film: Werewolves, Vampires and Zombies Kill Each Other For 90 Minutes (With The Occasional Onscreen Boob). 

Sadly enough, Underworld: Awakening is still better than the prequel Underworld film of which I saw 50%, but if you’re looking for a GOOD werewolf movie, do yourself a favor and watch Dog Soldiers, a film that I cannot recommend enough.  In fact, if you haven't seen Dog Soldiers, you'll be absolutely clueless when all the cool kids tell you to Spoon the fuck up.  As far as vampire films go, I’m not a huge fan of the genre, but may I suggest some Pale Blood?

Red Tails

            Saturday morning, I attended the very first matinee of the day, at 1220 pm.  I need to go to these more often, because the ticket was only $4.75 (caveat: I currently live in Southern Mississippi.)  Despite the 'early' time, the place was almost sold out.

            What movie had everyone up and about at the break of noon on a Saturday?

Red Tails.

On to the review!

            Now, this is going to be a tough review, because there are already people claiming that race has something to do with Red Tail's release date.  With that in mind, I'll do my usual review of what I thought of it as a movie, then address my theories on the race issue afterwards. 

            First off, Red Tails is an incredibly ambitious film.  It attempts to tell the story of a group of Tuskegee Airmen in the middle of WWII.  Based on real events, it follows the 332nd Fighter Group as they are given opportunities to demonstrate their flying prowess in real combat situations.

            The great:  Lucasfilms did a fantastic job with the special effects.  It's obvious that a lot of effort went into the dogfights.  All three dimensions were utilized perfectly, giving the action sequences that sense of utter chaos and confusion that one can only assume occurs when you're worrying about 360 degrees of combat.

            The good:  The actors.  While I'm not going to start handing out awards anytime soon, it's obvious that all the actors enjoyed their roles.  You can tell that many of them felt honored to be telling such an important, overlooked story in America's history, and they took it to heart. 

            The not-so-good:  The script.  Though the actors were fun to watch, holy shit did they have some absolutely terrible lines.  On top of that, because Red Tails is such a big movie, there are a ton of characters to introduce.  Whenever a movie has to do that, most of those characters become one-dimensional.  It's just a matter of budgeting your time in the movie.  You can't flesh out 24 people in 2 hours, so you make 22 of them simple.  'Funny guy,' 'angry guy', 'religious guy', etc.

            The problem here is that they tried to give you 6 or 7 fully fleshed-out characters, which ended up making EVERYONE one-dimensional.  Even the main characters end up being less than they could have been if the film has just calmed down and focused on two or three guys.

            The terrible:  Cuba Gooding Jr.  He's the lone exception to my good actors comment.  His entire role in this movie is to move the plot along when it starts to stutter, but he does it by use of  a huge pipe.  Yeah, that didn't make any damn sense to me either.  Someone apparently told him that all the cool officers in WWII smoked, and those that smoked pipes were even more awesome.

            All of his acting can be summed up thusly:  *Puts pipe in mouth with slow, grandiose movements.  Smile.  Wait for someone to say something.  Pull pipe from mouth.*  "Yes."  *Look thoughtful.  Put pipe back in mouth using motion that screams 'look at me!  I smoke a pipe!'* 

            It's painfully obvious that he has absolutely no idea what smoking a pipe is like.  Every awesome old man I ever knew who smoked a pipe made it seem like a natural extension of their body.  It just magically appeared and disappeared as needed.  It was never a distracting or flashy object for the real pipe smoker. It just was.

            Warning:  Opinions ahead.

            You cannot discuss the Tuskegee Airmen without addressing racism.  Red Tails knows that and tries to incorporate it into the plot.  Bryan Cranston is the racist-ass officer who squares off against Terrence Howard's character, and there are a few scenes where white Airmen interact with the Tuskegee Airmen, both in and outside of combat.

            The problem is that Red Tails would rather be a fun, entertaining family film.  It wants to be a low-violence war movie that makes you sit back and laugh, oohing and ahhing at the screen during the bloodless action sequences.  It stutters when it tries to make you shake your head and tsk when racism is briefly, lightly acknowledged.

            I just don't think you can that it successfully.  You can't have people cheering for your intrepid heroes and then, next scene, have a guy who has shown absolutely no rage issues suddenly become your angry, anti-racism character, then have him never address racism again.  Maybe it's the sloppy writing I mentioned earlier, but it feels like the race issues were only put in because you HAVE to address them when telling this story. 

            It's obvious that executive producer George Lucas would have happily ignored all of it if he could have and just given us two hours of the underdog proving the world wrong.  Unfortunately, George, this isn't The Mighty Ducks.  This is history.  That being said, I really don't think the studio's decision to release it in January was racially motivated.  I think it's because, at 2 hours, it's either far too short to tell the story it wanted, and far too long to be a light, family-friendly war movie.

            All in all, it's still a fun movie, but with the weight of history behind it, I can't help but think that it could have been so much better.  I still prefer my war movies to be gritty and realistic, and I genuinely would love to see this particular topic addressed in an adult way some day.

            I'll still take Black Hawk Down or The Thin Red Line over this any day, because I like my war movies to be gritty and painfully realistic.  I believe that no matter what war you're covering, keeping it clean and family-friendly does a disservice to the wars fought and the people who fought them. Clean war makes people think real war is just as clean.  Still, Red Tails is much, much better than Pearl Harbor or Flyboys.

2012 Predictions: Most movies will suck

It’s mid-January in 2012.  I think it’s high time I release my hopes and dreams for the year in film.  I mean, it’s never too early to talk about what hopes and dreams will probably be crushed, right? 

That being said, I’m going to try and break down this year’s films into a few categories, with a brief explanation of why I put them there.

Movies that I really, really, really hope I will love the shit out of:

Chronicle (Feb 3) – Yet another superhero movie AND a ‘found-footage’ style film, it still looks really cool.  The idea of three random dudes gaining super powers and then wrestling with what to do about it makes it look like a low-budget version of what Hancock failed to be.

The Hunger Games (Mar 23) – Based on the first book of a trilogy, The Hunger Games is the sort of teen novel that you can’t help but loan to all your friends, hoping they like it half as much as you did.  It's also the kind of book that has you threatening to punch anyone who dares compare it to Twilight.  If the movie is half as good, I’ll still love it.

The Avengers (May 4) – After years and years of set-up, Hollywood is finally ready to make what I hope will be the ultimate superhero film, Marvel edition.

Prometheus (Jun 8) – A prequel-that-is-not-a-prequel to Alien?  Sign me up!

The Dark Knight Rises (Jul 20) – It’s the goddamn Batman.

Skyfall (Nov 9) – New Bond film.  That is all.

World War Z (Dec 12) – The fact that zombies are getting really played out does not diminish my excitement for this Max Brooks adaptation.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Dec 14) – You shall not pass…this movie up.

Django Unchained (Dec 25) – I’m kind of bummed that I have to wait so long for the new Tarantino film.  However, judging by the casting and occasional news updates, it should most definitely be worth it.

Movies that I absolutely know I will hate:

American Reunion (Apr 6) – Who the hell asked for another American Pie sequel?

The Dictator (May 11) – Just in time to make fun of dead Middle Eastern dictators, Sacha Baron Cohen decides to lowest-common-denominator his own shtick.

Battleship (May 18) – Come on, do you really have to ask?

Men in Black III (May 25) – The sequel nobody wanted.  It also revealed how utterly ridiculous Will Smith has gotten.

Paranormal Activity 4 (Oct 19) – Damnit!  Way to squander any goodwill I had left after your super-shitty ending to PA3.  I also don’t appreciate how you’ve announced the movie before even finalizing a script.

Red Dawn (Nov 2) – Another movie that didn't need to be remade.  Can anyone watch the original, super-cheesy 'America, Fuck-Yeah!' version and think that a remake without Swayze, Sheen and Thompson would be better?

Life of Pi (Dec 21) – Read the synopsis and tell me this doesn’t look like 2012’s attempt at crappy, saccharine twee.

Movies that I hope won’t be as dumb as they look:

John Carter (Mar 9) – Now, I’ve never read the John Carter of Mars books, but this just looks so overblown that it’s hard to believe it’ll be any good.

21 Jump Street (Mar 16) – It’s a movie remake of a popular 80’s TV show.  Nothing could possibly go wrong.

The Three Stooges (Apr 13) – It took several years to get through production and went through about 80 different actors before finally settling on Will Sasso, Sean P. Hayes and Chris Diamantopoulos as the leads.  Yeah, exactly.

Campy Movies I really hope ARE as dumb as they look:

Iron Sky (Apr 4) – Attack of the Space Nazis.  Really.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Jun 22) – Read that title again and tell me you’re not expecting ridiculousness. (The video link is for the book that came out two years ago, not the movie trailer.)

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Jun 29) – It almost looks like they’re trying to apologize for the first live-action G.I. Joe movie by making this one completely different.

The Expendables 2 (Aug 17) – Will it be even more over the top than the first one?  Chuck Norris says yes!

Dredd (Sep 21) – A ‘gritty, realistic’ Judge Dredd film that claims to actually follow the comic.  Please be mindlessly violent and so non-winking that I can’t help but be entertained.

Kid’s movies I want to see even though I said ‘No Kid’s Movies’:

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (Mar 30) – Come on, it’s by the same guys that did Wallace and Gromit!

Paranorman (Aug 17) – From the guy that brought you Caroline, a movie that looks just as dark and fun.

Films I’m still on the fence about:

The Cabin in the Woods (Apr 13) – A long-delayed horror film written by Joss Whedon.  I’m afraid that this movie may have been delayed not because of some kind of stupidity on the studio’s end but because it’s not that good.

Dark Shadows (May 11) – I never really enjoyed the show when it used to rerun on the Sci-Fi channel.  That being said, the cast list is ridiculous, so maybe it’ll be fun?

The Amazing Spider-Man (Jul 3) – Look, if you’re going to remake a superhero story that JUST completed a trilogy, why the hell are you doing the origin story?  There are roughly 3 billion people who already know Spider-Man’s origin.  Plus, your line about starting over younger and going back to high school is absolute bullshit when you cast a 29 year old as your lead.

Total Recall (Aug 3) – A remake nobody asked for that will be nothing like the first movie that nobody asked for.  It’s hard to out-camp Ahhhnold, which is why I’m still unsure as to why they even tried.

47 Ronin (21 Nov) – Go head, look at the cast list.  Dozens of authentic Japanese actors…and Keanu Reeves.

At the end of 2012 I’ll come back to this list and see if every movie still belongs in its assigned category.  I would like to think I’ve nailed every prediction based on posters and previews alone, but I just know shit’s going to go horribly, terribly wrong.

What about you?  What movies are you excited for?  Which ones do you think are overhyped?  What’s going to be the big surprise hit this year?  At what point in the year do I become a sad, drooling mess?

The Darkest Hour

               Since I basically took December off with the assumption that most releases were going to be Academy Awards bait, I missed out on a couple of serious stinkers.  One of these films was The Darkest Hour, a teen sci-fi alien invasion movie that was released on Christmas Day for some strange reason.

               I mean, hell, it barely broke 2 digits of ‘freshness’ over at RottenTomatoes with an 11% overall rating.  THIS sounded like the sort of movie I should do for Mainstreamin’s January return, but I still needed a new release.  Hence Contraband’s review on Sunday.

              As much as I enjoyed Contraband, I despised The Darkest Hour.  One movie had entertaining action, plot, and actors, while the other was abso-freaking-lutely ridiculous, even for a sci-fi alien invasion film.

               In fact, the only thing they had in common was Faraday.

On to the review!

According to the synopsis that’s posted on IMDB.com, the plot for this film is ‘In Moscow, five young people lead the charge against an alien race who have attacked Earth via our power supply.’

First off, how the hell do aliens attack via a power supply?  That would involve them shooting out of…what…coal plants and nuclear facilities?  No, they attacked Earth because FOR its power supply.

Secondly, the whole ‘leading the charge’ part should be changed to ‘accidentally doing something useful while freaking the hell out and running around uselessly.’

Shit, I’m half a page in and I haven’t actually said anything about this film.  Okay.  Deep breath.

In The Darkest Hour, two young, photogenic American businessmen fly to Moscow to try and sell a social phone app to a Russian company, but find out that their Swedish business partner undercut them and has already sold the app.  They later run into two attractive women and the aforementioned asshole Swedish business partner in a bar.  Then aliens attack.  The next hour is spent trying to get out of Moscow while the invisible aliens try to absorb their energy, a process that turns living bodies into ash.

There ya go, there’s the plot.  What really ticks me off with these films are how lacking in originality they tend to be.  Survivors of an alien invasion stumble upon a weapon that just might turn the tide, but must risk their own lives in the process.

The idea of the aliens being made of a different form of energy was pretty cool, but then they ruined it by later showing you what the aliens looked like, and completely shooting apart the theory while explaining how the ultimate weapon worked. 

The other part that really pisses me off is just how damn photogenic everyone is.  After the alien attack, our five survivors hole up in a restaurant storage room for 11 days.  Of course, not a single drop of grime or dirt is on any of them.  If they get dirty in one scene they’re miraculously showered in the next.  That’s ridiculous.  After 11 days in a sparse room, shitting into used tin cans, everyone is going to look and smell disgusting.  I don’t need The Road style outfits, but at least pretend that your shit stinks.

Add that to the fact that our heroes are all 8+ on the 1-10 attractiveness scale, and it’s just insufferable.  Am I really supposed to believe that a few incredibly attractive twenty-something foreigners are going to be the ONLY people who can successfully navigate Moscow and possibly help save the world?

Look, I know I may not be properly conveying how I feel about this, but the point is, I want my survival horror/action/sci-fi movies to be believable from the human standpoint.  That’s what builds tension.  I want to feel that ‘holy shit, it could actually maybe totally play out like this.’  When you throw in such photogenic leads and make no attempt to let a single local be anything other than a laughable stereotype, you’ve completely lost me.  Now I’m bored and absolutely itching to tear every aspect of your film apart.

Anyhow, the movie sucks and while I do genuinely like Emile Hirsch in some films, this is not one of them.  The other actors/actresses are pretty much attractive throwaways.  I mean, they were IN other movies.  Good ones even.  They were just forgettable as individuals.

Oh yeah, and in case you’re wondering about the Faraday comment, in Contraband the main character’s name is Farraday, and in The Darkest Hour a Faraday cage is a major plot point.  That little bit of science geekery was the only thing I really enjoyed.

If you want a ridiculous, fun sci-fi movie, go check out the underrated 80’s film Enemy Mine.  It’s absolutely nothing like The Darkest Hour and that’s why I recommend it.  Sci-fi movies aren’t what they used to be, but even that genre doesn’t deserve this crap.   I’m having a genuinely difficult time thinking up a movie I liked less than this one.  Umm….still better than Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds, I guess.  Less hyped, at least.

Contraband

Mainstreamin's first film of 2012 is Contraband, starring everyone's favorite under-50 badass, Mark Wahlberg (whose name my fingers unconsciously began spelling as Marky...oops.)  I ended up really enjoying this movie, which probably bodes ill for 2012. 

Fortunately, seeing just how few sequels there are in 2012 when compared to 2011, maybe this year's crop will be better. 

Or maybe I'm finally starting to like more movies.

Naaaah.

On to the review!

            As stated above, Mark Wahlberg is Chris Farraday, our titular 'hero.'  There are no real good guys, but he is the stereotypical thief-gone-legit.  He has two kids and a wonderful wife, Kate, played by Kate Beckinsale.  The other main characters are his best friend, Sebastian Abney (Ben Foster) and his fuck-up brother-in-law, Andy (very aptly played by Banshee...I mean Caleb Landry Jones.)  There's just something about his appearance that makes Mr. Jones so convincing as a fuck-up.  I just cannot explain it.

            The plot kicks off pretty quickly as Andy dumps a package of dope off a cargo ship just as they're being boarded by the Coast Guard (I think.  I really didn't pay attention to uniforms.  Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)  This gets Andy hospitalized when he turns up empty-handed at the delivery site, as the guy who put together the smuggling operation, Tim Briggs (an excellently sleazy Giovanni Ribisi), doesn't appreciate his 10 pounds of cocaine being on the bottom of the ocean.

            That act is what fuels the plot, as Chris 'gets the gang back together' in order to pull off one more smuggling operation and pay off Andy's debts.  Of course, this being an action/thriller, everything that can go wrong does.  There are a few plot twists that are telegraphed incredibly early, but are entertaining enough to just sit back and enjoy.  Plus there's one decent twist halfway through the film that sets the film up for a tense ending.

            What I really appreciated about Contraband was just how little camera time was wasted.  The moment everything was completed in a scene, you were taken to a different one.  This is basically the anti-Drive, which was filled with long, lingering shots of everything.  Someone's done talking?  Move the camera.  Someone's done dying?  Cut away.  Simple.  Easy.  Done.  It never cuts away TOO soon, but it also doesn't suffer from the sin of many movies and  focus on obvious plot points.  The slow pan or a long linger is not inherently bad, it's just so greatly overused that its absence is actually noticed. 

            The acting ranges from great to perfectly reasonable.  Mark Wahlberg really does seem like the youngest Macho Actor right now, although I'd argue that Ryan Gosling could earn that title by doing more films like Drive.  (Yes, I'm well aware that Dwayne Johnson is also a Macho Actor, but until he does a string of films that don't involve Disney, he's just an actor who sometimes does action films.)

            My only complaints with Contraband are the kids and the accents.  The two sons are really and truly only there as plot devices, inserted into the film to add more suspense when the family gets threatened.  It's obvious that the director doesn't really care about them otherwise, as their reactions to certain scenarios are dubious at best. 

            The accents are more of a nit-pick, but they still annoyed me.  The movie is based in New Orleans, and when given the opportunity to really immerse you in a location that would make this already-fun movie really, really good, they waste it.  Everyone in this movie talks like they're from Boston or New York, except for Ribisi, whose accent can be called 'strange.'  I know New Orleans is filled with plenty of people who didn't live there, I've been there often enough.  But the locals have a bit of a drawl, and there are plenty of people who grew up in the surrounding countryside and have a HELL of an accent.  Yet none of them are present in this movie.  It's just a bit of a bummer.

            If you're looking for a movie to deliver some thrills and give you the rare bout of 'acting' in an action flick, you could do much, much worse than Contraband.  It's no Departed, but it's far and away better than many of the action movies I saw last year, like Columbiana or Hannah.