IN Icelandic film-maker Baltazar Kormakor’s energetic crime thriller, Mark Wahlberg plays Chris, once a smuggler at the pinnacle of his profession, now going straight with a family (Kate Beckinsale plays his wife, Kate) and a comfortable business installing domestic security systems!

Kate’s feckless brother Andy has escaped US Customs by dumping a cargo belonging to a major player in the New Orleans drug trade, the totally amoral sadist Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi).

Briggs orders Chris to get back in the game and replace the loss by bringing a shipment of counterfeit greenbacks from Panama City. This forms the prelude to a caper film with little intellectual value, but high adrenalin flows.

“Contraband” is populated by a bunch of disagreeable anti-socials quick to road rage, gun play and assorted other graphically-presented violence. Toward the end, its dog-eat-dog, no-honour-among-thieves plot skates over time and place to create a widespread come-uppance among the bad guys. Getting there is not the worst fun ever to hit the screen, although it sometimes feels like it.

At Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight