Contraband
- heavy
- kinetic
- extreme
- twisty
Heavy, breathless, extreme thriller / action, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →When his brother-in-law runs afoul of a drug lord, family man Chris Farraday turns to a skill he abandoned long ago—smuggling—to repay the debt. But the job goes wrong, and Farraday finds himself wanted by cops, crooks and killers alike.
Our read · Contraband (2012) reads as a heavy, breathless, grounded thriller · action · drama entry — extreme in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Contraband
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a blue-collar smuggling panic with Wahlberg protecting family at any cost.”
Skip it tonight — You dislike grim crime stakes, shaky moral math, or thrillers that stay relentlessly tense.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself