MOVIE REVIEW - “Traffic”
Rating: 3 out of 10
In my opinion, “Traffic” was a mediocre film at best, despite all the Oscar nominations it garnered. The film had an interesting look because the director used hand-held cameras often, and shot some scenes through color filters. I didn’t much care for these effects (phrase “color-blind Kurosawa” popped up in my mind while watching). But the fundamental weakness of the film was the script. Stories weren’t well thought out, and writing was just very, very lazy.
“Mosaic-like” was a phrase used to described the story
structure of “Traffic.” There were four
major separate storylines, each of them dealing with a different aspect of drug
trafficking:
a. Michael Douglas
is a newly appointed drug czar of the U.S. Government (describing policy-making
side of the drug war).
b. His daughter is a
drug addict (dealing with topics of drug consumption and recovery
process).
c. Catherine
Zeta-Jones’s husband is on trial for drug dealing. This storyline depicts police operation, as well as legal
processes of persecuting a drug lord.
d. Mexican policeman
(played by Benicio Del Toro) is recruited into a war against a major Mexican
drug cartel, and he experiences conspiracies and betrayals (sort of
stereotypical plot one would expect from a film about police fighting drug
dealers).
Without going into details, I will point out a few things
that are lazy about the writing of this film.
For a starter, see how the script connects storyline (a) and (b). How convenient and believable is it that as
soon as Michael Douglas is nominated for his post, his daughter turns into a
crack ho. Also, they try to overlap
story line (c) and (d) through one character (Mexican homosexual
assassin). It is obvious this doesn’t
work, since in each occasion this character shows up out of nowhere and doesn’t
contribute much to the plots. The main
contribution of this character is that he manages to blow up a car (so that an
obligatory explosion scene can appear in the film trailer).
The advantage of the “mosaic” method is that it has an
effect of masking how stupid each storylines are. If one storyline begins to go stale, then the script just switches to another storyline. But the end-result is still the same, in
that each of the stories are pretty predictable and uninteresting. For example, what do you think will happen
to Michael Douglas’s daughter, who, in the beginning of the film, is seen
smoking some drug? Try to think of the
most predictable developments, and yes, that’s in fact what happens to her in
the film.
Another weakness of the script is, NO DETAILS. Do we learn anything interesting about drug
trafficking, persecuting drug criminals, consumption of drugs, recovering from
drug addiction, government drug policies, ANYTHING? Not really.
I had a bad feeling about this film in the first few
minutes. One character (a high school
student) appears, and he is smoking some drug while playing a computer
Jeopardy. Then he shouts out answers
(“Aeschylus!” and “The Oresteia!”
). Why is he showing off his grasp of
the classics (is that what high school kids do nowadays when taking drugs)? Sure enough, the purpose of this was to
establish his character profile as wise-ass, cynical, intellectual type. What a lazy way to depict and develop a
character. And the whole film is filled
with this type of laziness.
3/29/01
Afterthought – After writing the above, I saw TV drama
“Traffik” on PBS. The movie was based
on this TV mini-series. “Traffik” was
amazing. What happened here is
Hollywood took a masterpiece and transformed it into something hardly worth
watching. What an accomplishment.