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A remake directed by a star of the original gets smuggled onto the Netflix Top 10

Nobody would have known better what made the story work.

contraband
via Universal

Remakes continue to be a staple part of the cinematic diet, and it surely won’t be too long before Hollywood runs out of worthwhile titles to repurpose for new audiences. While that day is a long way away, there likely won’t be many more cases as unique as that of 2012 Mark Wahlberg vehicle Contraband.

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A Hollywood reinterpretation of 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavík-Rotterdam, multi-hyphenate talent Baltasar Kormákur played the lead role in the original, and also served as one of the producers. A director in his own right, when the time came to bring the story Stateside, Kormákur stuck around to make Contraband his eighth feature from behind the camera, and first U.S.-backed project to secure a wide theatrical release.

via Universal

As far as mid budget genre films led by Wahlberg go, Contraband is reliably mediocre, as underlined by a bang average 51 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it’s become one of the biggest hits on Netflix over the weekend, once again highlighting the actor and producer’s credentials as an on-demand draw.

Per FlixPatrol, Contraband currently ranks as the fifth most-watched film on the platform in the United States, with subscribers evidently happy to kick back and relax with a standard tale following Wahlberg’s reformed criminal undertaking the fabled “one last job” to get his brother out of the debt he owes to a notorious criminal kingpin.

It’s hardly the most original or exciting run-of-the-mill action thriller you’ll ever see, but if you don’t go in expecting the world, then there’s some fun to be had smuggling Contraband.

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