So I picked a hell of a week to get back in this game: nine movies are coming out this weekend and we here at Worlds As Myth are going to judge whether they’re worth the price of admission (what’s the going rate on that now: a first-born son, right?), whether you should wait for it to come out on DVD, or just skip it all together – based on the TRAILER. No time to linger, we’re going to start pointing fingers.
For the sake of our sanity, we’ll go via the IMDB listing:
An ex-smuggler gets pulled back into the life when his brother-in-law gets into some serious ish. Starring Mark Wahlberg (The Italian Job, The Happening) as said reformed runner, Kate Beckinsale (The Aviator, next week’s Underworld: Awakening) as the wife with the ne’er-do-well sibling, and Giovanni Ribisi (Boiler Room, Avatar) as the smuggler who’s gonna f– said ish up, this movie has action-adventure with chuckles written all over it. But possibly not for the reasons they think: let’s take a look at the video and talk in a second.
Did…did those guys wrap duct tape around their faces? Don’t they know how hard it is to get that stuff off? I hope they got paid more than the going extra rate – jeez. So that looks…like a really forced situation, a somewhat tired, told story (“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in!“) but with armored cars blowing up and (phony?!) money that can’t get wet. As I’ve said before, in previous Around the Multiplexes (go ahead, look them up), action movies are supposed to be judged on a different scale, but this thing looks like it’s trying to tell a story (they even got a hell of a cast involved: Ben Foster (Liberty Heights, Pandorum) and J.K. Simmons (Spidermans 1-3, Oz) in on the mix) so forget that. I’m giving this a one-out-of-five Kate Beckinsale not in spandex (we’ll see you next week Kate) for seeing it in theaters and three-and-a-half-out-of-five lackeys wrapped in duct tape for seeing Contraband on Netflix.
That was easy! Only…eight more to go. Can I get a Hallelujah! because we’re moving onto:
Worlds As Myth 