Headlines

The Smuggler DVD Review

Published

10 years ago

February 29, 2016

Admin

Swallowing More Than He Can Chew

♦ Tripwire gave editor-in-chief JOEL MEADOWS the job of reviewing Australian black comedy drama The Smuggler

The Smuggler

Directors: Tony Mahony, Angus Sampson

Stars: Hugo Weaving, Angus Sampson, Leigh Whannell, John Noble

The Smuggler aka The Mule when it was released back in 2014 is an Australian dark comedy about first-time drug mule Ray Jenkins (Angus Sampson) who gets caught on his way back from Thailand and is held in police custody in Melbourne while they wait for him to pass the drugs through his system. At first glance, The Smuggler looks like one of those gross-out American comedies they made a lot of in the 1980s but as soon as you start watching it, you realise that this is a film with real intelligence and sophistication.

Jenkins is a slightly oikish amateur football team captain who is coerced by his friend fellow team member Gavin Ellis (Leigh Whannell) into acting as a mule to bring drugs back into Australia for the club’s owner, the evil Pat Shepherd (John Noble). But Jenkins screws up at the airport coming back into Australia. However, things are not quite as clear-cut as they first seem and Jenkins discovers that the local police may or may not be tied up with Shepherd.

The best Australian films manage to balance dark humour with drama in a unique and idiosyncratic fashion and The Smuggler sits comfortably among the best of down under’s recent output. Hugo Weaving, who has become well-known outside of Australia thanks to Lord of The Rings, is a revelation as malicious police detective Tom Croft. Noble, another actor who has made the move to the US on TV and Film in Lord of The Rings, Fringe and Elementary, is wonderfully malevolent here. Georgina Haig as Jenkins’ lawyer Jasmine Griffiths is also very likeable on screen, as one of the few genuinely sympathetic characters here.

The directors Mahony and Sampson do a great job of bringing the parochial, suburban mundanity of Melbourne to life on screen and they do succeed in garnering empathy for Jenkins from the viewer. The film doesn’t pull its punches either and there are a number of fairly horrible sequences, displaying Shepherd’s amorality.

The Smuggler is a crude, funny, intelligent, darkly comic drama with a great cast and a strong script.

JOEL MEADOWS