Year:
2000
Studio:
USA Films
Movie:
4/5
DVD:
3/5
Traffic is a movie
about the Mexico to US drug trade as told through various people whose
lives are affected by drugs. Javier and Manolo (Benicio Del Toro and
Jacob Vargas) are Mexican drug enforcement officers who have to deal
with the drug cartels and army corruption. Ray and Montel (Luis
Guzmán and Don Cheadle) are their US counterparts, who don't
have to deal with corruption but with a civilized criminal system.
Ray and Montel nab a dealer (Miguel Ferrer) who is going to turn
evidence against his boss David (Alec Roberts). This brings in David's
wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who didn't know that David was a
drug kingpin. With her life falling all around her she's going to need
more than the help of the family lawyer (Dennis Quaid) to survive.
Meanwhile, Judge Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is up for the job of US
Drug Czar. Unfortunately this is also the time when his daughter's
(Erika Christensen) drug problems finally surface and threaten to tear
the family apart.
It's a movie that is all over the place, jumping back and forth as the
different stories interconnect, though not greatly. The filming style
is relatively edgy and gritty, ranging from the dust and grime of
Mexico to the clean and polished homes of upper class America.
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I don't think
the movie has a moral point in the drugs should be legalized or drugs
should be banned sort of sense. It just tries to show that the drug
business is very complicated and affects lots of people. How to fix it
or even if it needs to be fixed is at best only presented in one scene
when Michael Douglas is talking to real politicians.
This is a two DVD set. There is no commentary track for the movie and
otherwise disk 1 only has an 18-minute "Traffic" special. Disk 2 has
lots of stuff:
• 26 minutes of deleted scenes, with optional commentary
• Demonstrations of Film Processing, Editing, and Dialogue Editing
• About 40 minutes of additional footage, mostly background stuff
• K-9 cards: reproduction of drug canine trading cards
I think this is a pretty interesting movie. If you go through the extra
material you'll realize that several things could have been drastically
different. It's a bit of an education on the drug trade.
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