It is an exciting look at the fight against drug war in America. One of those thrilling stories is that the Supreme Court judge in Ohio has been appointed by the president as the country's chief drug judge and the disaster happens when the man later discovers that his daughter is addicted to heroin. Another case involving two agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to reach the wife of a drugged man named Baron who is trying to get his property again.
It's wise about different kinds of addiction and concepts of family, about the folly, futility and hypocrisy of anti-drug 'wars', and about the awful human cost of it all. And it grips like a vice from start to end.
"Traffic" leaps into growing gorges between profit and principle and, from a law perspective, questions the sanity of ramming heads into walls of cocaine bricks. It remains one of the Zeroes' preeminent epics even after policy cinema's shift to terrorism.
Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.
Antagony & Ecstasy
July 09, 2012
A little masterpiece, at best, but for any other filmmaker, this would be a career highlight, while it's also easy to see how most other filmmakers would turn it into a dull, obvious harangue.
I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.