Mark Wahlberg has impressively progressed from a teenaged troublemaker to a polished actor. He’ll never be an Olivier, but Wahlberg possesses the intensity and sincerity to put across tough, physical roles that also require streetwise smarts. He is a perfect fit for Contraband, a high-octane smuggling thriller that is visually, if not dramatically, powerful.

A reformed smuggler (Wahlberg) is pressured back into the business to do a job that will save his young, stupid brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) from being killed by an angry gangster (Giovanni Ribisi). The smuggling job, which takes Wahlberg and his friends to Panama and back on a cargo ship, is exciting, especially when things go quickly wrong in Panama City. Director Baltasar Kormákur has fun exposing intricacies of the ship, demonstrating some of the tricks of the trade involved in sneaking things around the world.

Things get more complicated back home, as growling gangster Ribisi stalks and threatens Wahlberg’s wife (Kate Beckinsale, pretty much wasted in a throwaway role) and Wahlberg’s partner (Ben Foster) gradually reveals a secret side. It all comes to a head when the ship returns, and Wahlberg is able to set things right. The dramatics are compelling and restrained, though believability is not always high. For instance, when the captain of the ship (J. K. Simmons) learns that Wahlberg is definitely up to something, why doesn’t he confine Wahlberg in some way? Leaving him to run around the ship doing what he wants is just asking for trouble. Surely a captain has ways of confining people, even if the cargo ship doesn’t have a brig.

I like the way Kormákur handles the stolen painting angle, too, even though the payoff was easy to anticipate. Actually, there’s a lot to like in this movie; it’s set up to be sort of a working-class espionage movie, sort of like James Bond as a dock worker, without the gunfights. Other than some very obvious plot holes (how is it that Wahlberg is not arrested after leaving the captain’s house? wouldn’t Ribisi have ratted on him?) and artificiality regarding Beckinsale’s fate, it’s a decent entertainment.  Yet it could have been even better.  ✰ ✰ ½.  21 Jan. 2012.