Review No.62: Contraband

Trying to play catch-up now as we enter May and the first of three reviews is of the Mark Wahlberg film Contraband to which I'm not sure which genre it falls. I think it has aspirations of being sort of an action thriller in the vein of Gone in 60 Seconds though that had the appeal of a lot of shiny fast cars and Angelina Jolie not watching much instead Contraband has Kate Beckinsale not doing much while husband Wahlberg goes out looking for drugs. The similarities with Gone are like Cage, Wahlberg has also been out of the game in his case as a smuggler but has to do one last job after his brother-in-law gets into trouble with Giovanni Ribisi's psychotic drug baron. Going back on the ship his father used to use with his trusty sidekick, played by Lukas Haas, along with said brother-in-law he raises the suspicions of JK Simmons' captain so is forced to be the ship's errand boy. Once in Panama he meets up with Diego Luna who plays the guy who has the gear however once again he is a bit loopy so he and Haas wind up in trouble and almost miss the ship. Meanwhile on dry land Ribisi is threatening Wahlberg's wife played by Beckinsale so she and their sons go to stay with a family friend played by Ben Foster but is he all he seems?

As I said Contraband has the idea that it is a slick crime thriller in the vein of Ocean's 11 or the aforementioned Nic Cage film however its main problem is that it's very boring. There's no denying that Wahlberg is a charismatic film presence however here he is wasted as a slightly boring lead character who you fail to believe once did this smuggling lark for a living. In fact on the side of the good guys it is Ben Foster who is actually given a more interesting role so he runs with it and indeed it is the scenes featuring him that are some of the film's more intriguing. Ribisi and Luna both ham it up as two crazed villains on each side of the border however at times both of them lapse into caricature almost making this seem like a spoof of those heist films rather than one of them. It's fair to say that everything is quite stylish however there is no substance and not even JK Simmons doing another of his blustered authority figure roles can save the day. The biggest failure is the casting of Kate Beckinsale who has very little to do throughout although does seem to survive getting beaten about a lot throughout the film. I have to say I didn't have high hopes for Contraband but I thought at least I would be entertained however that didn't happen that's not to say it didn't have its moments but overall I was just disappointed.

Verdict: A film that promises a lot but never delivers with some really dull scripting and acting at least has a couple of interesting performances that bolster it up to 4/10

Review No.54: Underworld Awakening

I apologise dear readers for staying away for a week or so but for some of the films on this list I have to do a little research before delving in. When I say that I'm mainly talking about the sequels that have come out this year to earlier films that I haven't yet watched which over the coming months will include the Ice Age, Ghost Rider and Twilight franchises but first up was the Underworld films. I decided to watch Underworld and the sequel Underworld: Evolution but not the prequel as I surmised that that would not give me any extra information in terms of the characters' journeys. The first film saw vampire Selene help her kind in a war against the Lycans, a superform of werewolves, however she found out that a bunch of the vampire elders had conspired against her so destroyed them. In the second film she and vampire/lycan hybrid Michael learnt more of the history of the two races while trying to simultaneously survive and have sex with each other at the same time. In Awakening the threat to the vampires and the lycans is from the humans who have kidnapped Selene and Michael and have frozen them both with the former waking up twelve years in the future a time in which the humans have tried to kill of as many of both species as they can. Predictably Selene escapes with a young girl who turns out to be her and Michael's daughter she is helped by a vampire named David and sheltered briefly by his father played by Charles Dance until she is cast out following an attack by a breed of super lycans. These lycans are later revealed to be Stephen Rea and his son who were supposed to have been working on a vaccine to stop the lycans but in fact were creating a more powerful strain. As you would imagine though Selene is able to finish them off with ease and she and Eve then try to find Michael or at least set up for yet another film in the franchise.

When sitting down to watch Underworld Awakening I wasn't expecting much as the first two films had essentially involved CGI wolves, Kate Beckinsale in leather and a lot of shooting. However for me this was certainly the better of the two sequels if not quite up there with the original mainly as the threat to the lycans came mainly from men. I liked the fact that it concentrated on parent/child relationships and I feel that there was more dialogue here than there had been in the first two films despite the fact that this was drastically shorter than both of those. I feel then that that's definitely one of the negatives here as are the sections which just revert back to the tried and tested Underworld format albeit with slightly larger lycans. Beckinsale essentially is on autopilot throughout although there are some good hammy performances, as there always are in the Underworld films, from the likes of Charles Dance and Stephen Rea in addition I did like the fact that the woeful Scott Speedman is nowhere to be found here. In closing I would say that if you wanted more or less the exact same thing from your Underworld films then you're in luck with Awakening, which to be fair does have a little more to offer, but it's far too short and reverts back to an easy formula on too many occasions.

Verdict: Despite some promise this film is too short and diverts back to the Underworld format which I'm not a fan of so I'm going to award it 4.5/10