Movie reviews
It sounds like a wacky concept, but Cameron Crowe’s film, which is set in the US but is loosely based on Benjamin Mee’s autobiographical account of buying Dartmoor Zoo in Devon, is a thoughtful meditation on learning to live with loss. Damon is soundly cast as Mee, a forthright and likeable character who takes on the enormous challenge of refurbishing the zoo and turning it into a profitable park, as well as a home for his children, despite having no experience at all of exotic animals. Of course, the lions, tigers and grizzly bears are little more than set decoration: what matters here is how the emotionally caged Benjamin and his bereft teenage son Dylan (Colin Ford) come to terms with their inability to console one another. There are mawkish moments, and Crowe occasionally overplays his hand, but for the most part the story respects the intelligence of the audience, conveying with admirable simplicity the difficulty of overcoming even the most straightforward of obstacles when your vision of life is poisoned by grief. Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church and young Maggie Elizabeth Jones all provide strong support.
A former ‘world-class smuggler’, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) has retired from the game to become a happily married family man. As Contraband (15A) opens, however, Chris’s brother-in-law gets in hock to ganglord Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), which results in an unpayable debt that requires Chris to get back into the life he thought he’d left behind. And so he puts together a team which signs on with a cargo ship heading for Panama, where Chris will finesse a deal worth millions in counterfeit money. The ‘one last heist’ motif is as old as the crime movie itself, but Baltasar Kormákur’s film offers the novelty of watching smugglers operate under the noses of the ship’s captain.
