BEFORE: It occured to me too late that I could have linked from Jeffrey Wright in "Broken City" to two movies that are playing in theaters right now, "No Time to Die" and "The French Dispatch". I do love the Wes Anderson movies, so I'm very curious about "The French Dispatch", I've heard good things. And then from there I could link to "Monster" or "The Goldfinch" and be right back in this chain, though I might then be two movies shy - sure, then I could add "Dune" in December, between two other Oscar Isaac movies. Ah, that would have been nice, wouldn't it? But my chain's already set until Christmas, and I just haven't been going out to the theater, so I guess these films will all have to wait. I'd mostly rather cross off films that I already have on DVD, because that frees up more slots on my list for films I want to add to my DVR. I swear, one of these days I'm going to catch up and then I'll practically live at the movie theater again.
For now, it's stick to the plan, keep my head down and keep making progress, a little every day, and then after 30 more movies, I'll hit the end of the year, the counter will reset and I can work in probably any movies I want in January - with the enormous cast of "The French Dispatch", it can probably fit just about anywhere, so I don't want to waste it now, when I already have linking in place, I may need to save it to get me out of a linking jam next year, you never know.
Mark Wahlberg carries over from "Broken City".
THE PLOT: To protect his brother from a drug lord, a former smuggler heads to Panama to score millions of dollars in counterfeit bills.
AFTER: Today happens to be my 20th wedding anniversary, there's no real connection to this film, like I had with Election Day yesterday, except that my wife and I did go on a cruise in 2013 that stopped in Panama, and we got to see the Panama Canal in action as our boat went through it. We also got to see the 2nd Panama Canal being built - yes, there's a second one - and we were ALMOST there for the big 100th anniversary of the canal, except it was opened in 1914, so it was only 99 years old when we were there.
Part of this film is set in Panama, I obviously knew that the canal made the country a vital passageway for cargo ships, but I didn't know it was such a hotbed of smuggling. Allegedly. To be honest, I have a lot of questions tonight about whether this film is accurate in its portrayal of smuggling, or if the screenwriter just made up a bunch of stuff about smuggling in order to hit narrative points, or just to make smuggling look cooler than it is.
Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a former smuggler who retired, and now runs a security alarm business and has a wife and two young sons. But he gets pulled back into the action when his wife's brother is almost caught smuggling drugs into the U.S., but now is on the hook to the drug importer for the value of the cargo he was forced to throw into the ocean. If you believe this film, and I'm not saying that I do, then it seems like all of the employees working on cargo ships are also doing a little business for themselves, like they leave the ship in a port, pick up a few "souvenirs" and deliver them back to the U.S. But this seems like hiding in plain sight, and isn't this all rather obvious? Wouldn't you think that security would be extra tight on a cargo ship just to, you know, prevent this sort of thing from happening?
Farraday had the connections, back in the day, and worked all the angles, and he and his ex-partner apparently had all these super-creative ways of hiding things in other things to get them into the U.S., again, almost in plain sight. But it all sounds like WAY too much effort, if you ask me, all this extra work to hide things on a ship. It's got to be easier just to hire a low-flying plane to drop whatever you want to import to an island a few miles offshore, don't cha think? Ah, but then we wouldn't have a cool movie with a renegade smuggler outsmarting "the man" at every turn, doing the noble task of importing valuables to save his family.
See, what's worse here than making smuggling look "cool" is bending the story over backwards in order to make smuggling "right". What he's doing is still illegal, in every possible way, but because he's doing it to save his brother-in-law, we the audience are supposed to look the other way, and consider this guy some kind of "anti-hero", just because he refuses to traffic drugs. Oh, but a stolen van, counterfeit bills, those are all OK, right? Hmm, no, they're all just as illegal. It's a slippery slope when you start saying THIS crime is not as bad as THAT crime. Smuggling drugs, vehicles, painting, in the eyes of the law it's all the same thing - the lead character taking a moral stance against drug smuggling hardly matters if there's other stuff he's sneaking in. Right? Jeez, you guys almost had me there, you almost got me to root for the smugglers.
Also, this film suggests that the captain of a cargo ship probably KNOWS that his crew is bringing home a little something extra with them, and in some cases, he's just mad that he isn't getting a payoff, or a little taste of the action. Again, this is cool for a movie plot, but I'd like to see some evidence to back this up, like a fourth grade math problem where you can't just write down your answer, the teacher wants to see your work, how you got to the answer, to prove you didn't just copy it off somebody else's test.
Meanwhile, as Chris is off in Panama looking for something that isn't drugs to smuggle into the U.S., his wife and sons are being looked after by his ex-smuggling partner, who, umm, turns out never retired from the game, which Chris doesn't know. This could be bad, especially if he has an interest in bringing more drugs into the port of New Orleans, which Chris is dead-set against. Chris hooks up with an old source in order to get a giant stack of counterfeit U.S. money, and again, HOW is that much better than drugs? Especially when, through a complicated set of events, several Panamanians are shot during the pick-up of said funny money. Well, now it's blood money, where are your scruples now, Chris? The drugs may cause overdoses in America, but people are dying NOW in Panama trying to get your shipment on board. So this guy's a total hypocrite, and I just can't root for him.
There's some kind of problem with the bills, which I didn't understand, but I really can't fathom why nobody landed on the easiest potential solution to the problem with the drug dealer, who's been saying that Chris' brother-in-law owes him $700,000 after dropping his shipment. (Where have I seen this problem before... oh, right, Han Solo owing Jabba the Hutt....). The drug dealer wants money, you've got a big pile of counterfeit bills, why not just GIVE the drug dealer $700K in phony money? He's probably not smart enough to tell the difference - yet this is never considered as an option, not even for a second. I guess because that's too quick of a solution, then the movie's over too soon. But I thought of it, maybe the screenwriter just didn't?
Maybe that's why everything just feels much more complicated than it needs to be - there's a lot of conversations that need to happen while Chris is away but DON'T happen because the cell phones keep crapping out at the worst possible moments. This all feels like "time filler", just like it did in "The Midnight Sky", with inconvenient problems with the spaceship's communications that also conveniently extended the length of the movie. And then the ending is like SUPER contrived here, about five unlikely things have to happen to get the desired resolution here.
This film is NOT based on the Han Solo story, it turns out, it's an American remake of an Icelandic (?) film titled "Reykjavik-Rotterdam", starring Baltasar Kormakur (the Icelandic Mark Wahlberg, I guess...) and which somehow featured BOTH of Iceland's gigantic three-named actors, Olafur Darri Olafsson AND Johannes Haukur Johannsesson. I didn't think that was possible, to put them both in the same film, because you might expect then the catering budget alone would probably bankrupt the production. But apparently it happened, and maybe you CAN tell these two actors apart, if you try very hard - at least this proves they're not really the same giant, bearded person. Only one of them was available to star in the Hollywood remake, however, which kind of proves my point. Maybe these guys are vicious rivals and you can't have them on the same set.
NITPICK POINT: Why is "Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker the only song that is used these days to represent scenes taking place in New Orleans? I know that NCIS spin-off uses it, too, so what gives? Are music supervisors just really lazy, because I know there are many, many songs in the blues vein that don't get used nearly as often.
Also starring Kate Beckinsale (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Giovanni Ribisi (last heard in "The Virgin Suicides"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Diego Luna (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Palm Springs"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Robert Wahlberg (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Jaqueline Fleming (last seen in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"), William Lucking (last seen in "The Rundown"), David O'Hara (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Kirk Bovill (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Lucky Johnson (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Viktor Hernandez, Olafur Darri Olafsson (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Jason Mitchell (also carrying over from "Broken City"), Kent Jude Bernard (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Jackson Beals (last seen in "The Vault"), Connor Hill, Bryce McDaniel, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), J. Omar Castro (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Jack Landry (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Ian Casselberry (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Michael Beasley (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Turner Crumbley, Laura Iglesias.
RATING: 4 out of 10 useless customs agents
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