Traffic Is An Eloquent Argument Against The War On Drugs

The Good: Excellent acting, Good rendering of various cultures in the drug conflict, direction!
The Bad: Inconsistent characterization, Pacing near the end, Unrelenting tone of futility
The Basics: A searing look at the drug trade and the effort to combat it, Traffic follows several people in their conflicts with drugs.


It's hard to make a good drug movie; if a film advocates drugs, it usually illustrates it poorly, using specious reasoning for the legalization of drugs and if a film speaks out against drugs, it's viewed as conservative, out of touch or a ridiculous "Hallmark Movie of the Week" for kids. It's a shame that Traffic is rated R, because this could be the best film to show in classrooms to the defiant young people who fail to believe in the consequences of drugs.

Traffic is a multi-layered story that follows various parts of the drug trade on the US/Mexico border. Montel Gordon and his partner Ray are DEA officers who are investigating Carlos, a heavy drug dealer who is ratted out by one of his minions. Carlos's wife, Helena, is feeling ostracized by her peers and wants the lifestyle she is accustomed to. In Mexico, Javier Rodriguez is being wooed by General Salazar, the chief force in the Mexican drug war combating production. Meanwhile, north of the border, Robert Wakefield is made the President's leader in the anti-drug effort in the United States. Wakefield's daughter, meanwhile, finds herself more and more addicted to heroin.

The plots weave together, with Wakefield's daughter ending up as a crack prostitute on the run from her father, Wakefield gets into a crisis of faith as his professional responsibilities conflict with his need to hold his family together. Javier, realizes that Salazar is not what he seems and attempts to inform the U.S. authorities of the danger in Mexico. And Montel works hard to keep Eduardo while Helena takes over Carlos's business and attempts to get her husband freed.

The biggest problem with Traffic is the failure to repeat character names. I spent the film referring to Montel as "Don Cheadle's character." Salazar, Javier and Javier's partner Manolo, are the only characters who have their names repeated enough to actually remember. It's irksome, especially considering how very many characters there are in this movie.

Traffic is the best inditement against drug use and the drug trade to come down the pike, well, ever. First, the leading power in the anti-drug trade, Robert Wakefield, continues to address the biggest problem, treating the addiction and ending the marketplace for drug use. Add to that, Javier illustrates the functional problem in the fight against the drug trade; a lack of a unified front between U.S. and Mexican enforcement agencies. The arguments are presented eloquently in the less-preachy form of a narrative and it works very well that way.

Moreover, the film is not biased completely against the drug trade; Helena's plot clearly illustrates the benefit of being in drug distribution. She has quite the lifestyle and it's extravagant. But the film is wickedly intelligent, illustrating the risks of that lifestyle very well.

Finally, the interrogations Montel and Ray go through with the rat from Carlos's organization, reveal the tired arguments for why drugs ought to be legalized and the futility of the drug fight. In truth, the only one that sticks by the end of the film is the idea that the budget used to fight drugs could instantly be turned into a tax cow for the government if legalized. The health aspects are shown with the clever parallel plot with Wakefield's daughter. The lifestyle she sinks into is quite unflattering and a real eye opener.

The direction works wonderfully. Steven Soderbergh's direction is incredible. His use of contrasting color and unflattering light acts as a motif that furthers the ambiguity and harshness of the war on drugs. The bright yellows of Mexico appear as a violent, natural contrast to the artificial blue light that characterizes the U.S. scenes.

But Traffic isn't a preachy film. It packs the screen with great actors who are working well. Of course, Michael Douglas, is great as Wakefield, lending the role strength and dignity that makes him such a natural actor for government roles. Benicio Del Toro is great as Javier, playing the rogue Mexican police officer. He's far more comprehensible than any other film I've seen him in.

The film's best acting comes from Don Cheadle. He takes on a strong dramatic role in Traffic. He plays Montel as a man with great inner strength and a wonderful physical presence. He's in the best shape of the cast and it makes sense that he would be the one running and jumping and such. His dialog is great, laid back body language fits his character perfectly.

In the end, Traffic is a compelling film that follows all angles of the drug trade and it does it with style, even if near the end it begins to drag in terms of plot.

For other works with Luis Guzman, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Old Dogs
He’s Just Not That Into You
Yes Man
Fast Food Nation
Waiting . . .
Punch-Drunk Love
Magnolia
Snake Eyes
NYPD Blue - Season 1

8/10

For other film reviews, be sure to visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the films I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A Huge Disappointment, The Longer The Informant! Drags On, The Worse It Becomes.

The Good: Moments of humor, Moments of concept
The Bad: Plot gets murky, Characters are universally unlikable, Acting is frequently bad, Pacing!
The Basics: Despite a good and entertaining start, The Informant! drags and becomes less funny and less interesting as it goes on.


[This was originally written in 2009, explaining the opening! Enjoy!]

Usually when I participate in a film screening, I come right home and eagerly write my review of the film I've just seen. I love being in-the-know early and sharing the scoop so that others may plan their weekends and the like. So it ought to say something that it has taken me until now to get up the enthusiasm to pen my review of The Informant! when I went to a screening on Tuesday night. Wow am I wishing I had not wasted the gas and time on that trip! The only thing worse than a bad film sometimes is having to drive a hundred miles to see it.

For those who have seen the previews for The Informant! they do exactly what preview trailers are intended to do; they sell the film and try to get people in to see the movie. Unfortunately, in the case of The Informant! one is likely to be left feeling like they have been swindled as it is made to look funnier by the trailer than the movie actually is. In fact, The Informant! is initially engaging, but it quickly belabors itself and falls into a long, humorless rut that becomes slower and much more difficult to watch. While the film is actually fairly short, my partner and I thought it dragged so much that she thought it was a three hour film, while I said it felt like a five hour endeavor.

In 1992 at the Decatur, Illinois Archer Daniels Midland corporate headquarters, Mark Whitacre is trying to solve a problem with a parasite inhibiting lysine production. The agriculture giant ADM is losing seven million dollars a month as the lysine problem stretches on and Whitacre gets a call from a Japanese scientist implying he has a way to solve the problem . . . for the right price. This act of extortion against ADM puts Whitacre in touch with the FBI and opens an investigation into the corporate practices at ADM. Whitacre reveals to the FBI that ADM is involved in a worldwide price-fixing conspiracy on corn production and the FBI begins to build a case against ADM based upon tapes that Whitacre makes for them.

But as the investigation reaches the level where litigation begins, the FBI and the Justice Department begin to have serious issues with Whitacre's credibility. Before a raid on ADM, Whitacre lets some key people in the company know the raid is coming and he even harbors the belief that if the executives of ADM are taken down, he will be made new CEO. Amid his delusions, Whitacre struggles to provide the FBI with facts and keep his family together.

The problem is that The Informant! is both slow and devolves from a caper on exposing corporate crime into a character study in delusion much the way A Beautiful Mind (reviewed here!) changes from a spy story into a mental illness tale. The analogy is not inapt and while Matt Damon is instantly engaging and funny as Mark Whitacre, the character becomes subsequently less interesting as the film progresses and the viewer witnesses his compulsion toward lying. Whitacre becomes difficult to empathize with and what is charming at the beginning becomes more annoying as the film goes on.

From the outset of The Informant! the viewer is treated to life inside the head of Mark Whitacre via voice-over. As various characters talk to Whitacre, he loses interest and begins thinking about indoor pools and travel and other things that are very much not in the moment. He blanks out at key moments when FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard is speaking to him and when his lawyer is asking him questions. And while they initially bring a smile to the viewer because of the non sequitors, the longer the film goes on, the more they distract from the flow of the movie. As well, they seem more out of place when the movie shifts from trying to amuse as a somewhat quirky corporate story to the character study of a man bogged down in a legal battle because of his actions. In other words, once the movie is not trying to be funny any longer, the voice-overs become an annoyance that tries to get back the attention of the viewer.

Outside Mark Whitacre, The Informant! is populated by characters that are entirely zeroes. All of the government agents are monolithic and lack any sense of quirk or character to make them interesting. In fact, there are few scenes with only the FBI agents or members of the ADM legal team and those scenes mainly fill in important plot points. Annoyingly, scenes that use some of the best potential talents are few and far between. So, for example, almost every scene that includes actor Tony Hale is in the preview trailer. In fact, it takes so long for Hale to enter the film, I had almost stopped expecting him to.

Particularly problematic is the use of Scott Bakula as Shepard. Bakula, who has proven he can act with charisma in films like American Beauty (reviewed here!) is particularly stiff as Shepard. Virtually all of his lines are performed with a dry delivery that make it difficult to watch him when he is onscreen opposite Damon's Whitacre he acts as a black hole into which all interest in the movie is sucked and destroyed. I understand that playing an FBI agent might not be the most exciting roll, but Bakula plays it as if it is the death sentence to his illustrious career.

Matt Damon does fine as Mark Whitacre, but he is saddled with playing a character whose journey takes him from fascinating to disappointingly droll in almost record time. Damon milks the role for all it is worth, but at times he reverts to familiar deliveries as he tries to make Whitacre funny. In fact, at one point in the film - despite the presence of the big bushy mustache - Damon channels his character from Dogma (reviewed here!) and delivers the line as Loki. Damon's performance stops being a decent foil for Bakula's lethargic impersonations of an FBI agent and director Stephen Soderbergh fails to get the best out of him.

As the peripheral characters fail to pan out and the movie treads into territory where the corporate crime investigations become peripheral to the character issues surrounding the unlikable Mark Whitacre, the film becomes progressively more boring. Sometimes, that's all there is to call it. The Informant! has a good start, but it gets boring and fast.

For other works with Patton Oswalt, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Blade: Trinity
Zoolander
Magnolia

4/10

For other films reviews, please be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all of my movie reviews!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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I Allowed Myself To Get Excited About Haywire And Rediscovered Utter Disappointment.

The Good: Acting
The Bad: No real plot, Terrible editing/direction, No real character development.
The Basics: Haywire is a surprisingly disappointing series of chases and fights that does not add up to much of anything.


Tonight, my wife and I had a date night for the first time in several weeks. She wanted to treat me to a movie and I actually put off the offer until this week. There was nothing in the local theaters that I wanted to see until this week, so we went to see Haywire tonight. Earlier today, the film got a boost in my mind when I learned that it was written by one of the writers of Dark City (reviewed here!), which is one of my favorite movies. After all of the advertisements for it, all I truly knew about Haywire was that the film had an amazing cast and it had something to do with spies.

Honestly, after seeing the film, that's pretty much all I know about the film. This was hardly one of Lem Dobbs' successes and one suspects that even Steven Soderbergh fans will be largely unimpressed by it. Haywire is basically a random collection of fight scenes and chase scenes held together by rather preposterous bits of plot exposition. And there is something appropriate about how the film opens and ends with the word "Shit."

And I went into the film excited, looking forward to the movie!

Mallory is sitting in a diner when she see Aaron coming. She knows Aaron from a mission she was on a few days prior in Barcelona and when he tries to force her to come with him, she breaks his arm and flees with a private citizen, a young man named Scott. As Scott and Mallory drive off to evade law enforcement, Mallory tells Scott her story.

Mallory worked with Aaron in Barcelona on a covert mission to rescue a captured whistleblower. Turning Jiang over to Rodrigo, Mallory thinks her work is done and she prepares to leave the company she executed contracts with. But her boss and former lover, Kenneth, has one last mission for her. The night Mallory returned from Barcelona, she is retasked to Dublin to meet with Paul. Paul quickly proves he cannot be trusted and when he tries to kill Mallory, Mallory manages to turn the tables on him. She contacts Kenneth's employer and tries to return home, searching for the truth as she goes.

I honestly wish that I had more to write about Haywire but this is one of those films that I am baffled was made based on the fact that there seem to be large gaps in the story that are filled with Mallory running or getting into an extended altercation. The running gets old and occupies several minutes of multiple scenes. Similarly, the fights are some of the most choreographed fights in recent cinema. The bigger problem with the fights is that director Steven Soderbergh does not cut the fight sequences very well. So, during at least two of the knock-down drag out fights, there are noticeably bad cuts where two takes were melded less than seamlessly. I'm talking, mid-kick the film cuts to another take!

Also bad is the sound editing. In addition to having background conversations that are inappropriately loud in some of the quiet scenes, some of the dialogue is seriously garbled. Channing Tatum, who plays Aaron, mumbles his way through virtually all of his lines. While I want to say that this robs the viewer of valuable information, that would imply that the movie is actually intended to be about an elaborate conspiracy in the spy community. In actuality, the conspiracy that links the scenes together is more of a pretense to make the film. The truth is, Haywire is just the a bunch of fights and chases that have a plot as an afterthought.

Sadly, the film is also similarly light on character development. What irked me almost instantly was that Michael Fassbender's Paul is characterized as a spy of the same caliber as Mallory. And yet, she is nowhere near as smart or cunning as Mallory. While Mallory utilizes the first opportunity he leaves his equipment around to spy on her new partner, Paul neither catches her intrusions, nor appears to execute any machinations of his own. Given that all these characters are supposed to exist in the same industry at the same high skill level, it is frustrating to see some of them playing on a completely different level. This does not make Mallory more heroic, it simply makes it seem like she is seriously more competent than her adversaries.

What Haywire does have is a decent cast and most of the acting is good, at the very least. Gina Carano is interesting and credibly fit as Mallory. She is eminently watchable as Mallory and she sells the action scenes fairly well. Michael Angarano plays Scott and there is some irony to his role in Haywire. The irony comes from the fact that Angarano plays a character virtually identical in characterization and mannerisms as Scott Speedman's character in Underworld (reviewed here!). Actually, the car chase sequence in Haywire reminded me strongly of a similar scene in Underworld and it has been years since I saw that movie!

The rest of the performances are very average with great actors like Michael Douglas, Antonio Bandaras and Ewan McGregor performing well within their established bounds. Michael Fassbender takes a serious step back in his rise to a-list by presenting a depressingly listless performance as Paul. Channing Tatum, similarly, does fine as a secret agent type, though we have seen him in a similar role before.

In the end, Haywire is nowhere near as good as its previews. Instead, this is a movie that feels like one long, boring trailer that drags out for full feature length

For other spy movies, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Unknown
The Bourne Identity

2.5/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Marion Cotillard Makes Music Appear And The Strengths Are The Same As The Weaknesses Of Contagion!

The Good: Realistic presentation of the effect of a plague throughout various facets of society, Acting.
The Bad: Realistic presentation of the effect of a plague throughout various facets of society, Pacing.
The Basics: Contagion does what it sets out to do extraordinarily well, but in the process creates a movie so far from entertaining as to be impossible to recommend.


Over the summer, there were very few preview trailers for movies that actually excited me and made me think "I'd like to see that!" One of the few was Contagion which had a more engaging teaser than The Dark Knight Rises. But now, having gotten back from the screening of the film, I am finding I have remarkably little to say, though I am content to begin with the idea that the trailer makers cut the trailer to make the film look much more engaging, tense and fast paced than the movie ever came close to being. This is not 28 Days Later (reviewed here!) where things happen fast and there are quick reversals and a pounding sense of tension throughout.

In fact, Contagion is boring. Someone had to say it and I am fine with it being me. The movie is great at what it does - with one niggling exception - and as a result, creates a reality that is so close to our reality that it becomes tiresome exceptionally quickly. Writer Scott Z. Burns explores the worldwide phenomenon of a disease and he and director Steven Soderbergh explore every major conceivable category of people. This makes for a realistic, documentary feel to the film, but a movie with characters so largely underdeveloped that it is impossible to invest in the fate of any of them.

Contagion explores the 144 days of a highly infectious disease that wipes out tens of millions of people. This film is populated by various strata which include: an immune private citizen, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, a CDC field operative, a World Health Organization worker, a blogger, the head of Homeland Security in the U.S., two doctors, and a translator for the epidemiologist. To give each of the perspectives, each is robbed of their quirks or enough airtime to actually be worth empathizing with. To wit, Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO epidemiologist Leonora Orantes, falls out of the film from Days 14 through Day 133 (or more, I stopped taking notes at that point). She is not missed, though her character has one of the more overt struggles in the movie it goes largely unseen.

Starting on Day 2, Beth Ehoff is in Chicago where she has just cheated on her husband, Mitch. She arrives home in Minneapolis, sweating and exhausted. The next day, a blogger in San Francisco, Alan Krumwiede, tries to bring the San Francisco Chronicle a story about a man dying on a subway in Asia. Not believing he has a significant story, he is sent on his way. But the next day, Beth dies with wide eyes, foaming at the mouth and her son, Clark, follows shortly thereafter. Mitch is put into quarantine as the CDC, under Dr. Ellis Cheaver sends Dr. Erin Mears to try to study and contain the disease.

But soon, containment is the least of the worries as an estimated one in twelve people worldwide contract the disease and the death toll mounts. Orantes is taken hostage by the survivors of a village desperate to get a cure and Dr. Hextall, seeing the virulence of the virus, takes the most risky step to try to save humanity. And back in Minneapolis, Mitch tries desperately to protect his daughter from looters and the boy she likes by barricading themselves in their home.

There is a lot going on in Contagion and it is a highly plot-driven film. I have four pages of notes on the movie which detail plot points of places mentioned, populations and events, but the movie boils down to yet another near-apocalypse from a viral outbreak and the race to save humanity. The film is presented almost like a documentary (though blissfully without annoying handheld camera work). As a result, the movie is almost entirely devoid of a soundtrack, save when Marion Cotillard is on screen and an in-scene piece of music near the very end of the movie. While this helps to maintain the reality of the movie, it also makes the movie that is allegedly 105 minutes long feel about four times that length.

Some of the plots add to the reality, but do nothing for the viewability of the film. Alan's story goes from being one of a smalltime blogger intuiting his way into the biggest story of the era to a tale of corruption that is ultimately disappointing. Alan exposes the disease, starts pressing the idea that Forsythia is an effective treatment, is put on legitimate news outlets and ends up being exposes as a man profiting off his own advice. The truly disappointing thing about his arc is how Burns makes him into a monolithic character who is homogeneously wrong. Krumwiede raises the legitimate point that by rushing the vaccine tests potential side effects and long-term effects are absolutely unknown and could lead to tremendous troubles in the future. This is a legitimate concern and at the moment when it seemed like the movie might explore that, Alan is instead completely discredited. The dialectic nature of the character and the conflict he has makes it seem far more simple than it ought to.

The same could be said for many of the characters at one point or another, but because the movie is so plot-driven, it is pointless to elaborate. Instead, it is worthwhile to focus on the other major plot problem. In a movie where it takes twelve days for a doctor no longer on the project to grow strains of the virus, it seems ridiculous that by the twenty-ninth day, an effective vaccine is in mass production. As looting skyrockets and Mitch observes his neighbors being murdered from across the street, the peril drops off abruptly and is replaced by a very political sensibility to the movie.

For those who are freaked out by medical movies, Contagion has shockingly little gore or truly objectionable material. While the trailer revealed one of the most shocking moments with an infected person walking into traffic, which happens very early in the movie, the most graphic moment of the film comes on Day 6 when Beth's autopsy is done and her skull is cut open. If you make it through that scene, it's smooth sailing the rest of the film for the graphic unsettling department.

What keeps the film from being a total wash is the acting. Contagion features the best performance I have yet seen from actress Kate Winslet. Winslet plays Dr. Mears and she is efficient, clinical and at the moments she needs to be, deeply human. She is troubled by what she sees in the field, especially when she has to keep from Mitch that Beth was having an affair. Winslet is good, especially as the movie goes on. Mears also gives the opportunity for Laurence Fishburne's Dr. Cheever to do something we seldom see in film; have a boss show concern for an employee in a realistic way. Fishburne handles the jargon just fine and he presents the facts of the spread of the disease in a way that anyone who has seen C.S.I. or The Matrix would expect him to. But when he has to ask Winslet's Mears how she is doing, Fishburne makes Cheever into one of the most human and relatable characters in Contagion.

Unfortunately, Matt Damon is not so lucky. Playing Mitch, Damon's time to have the character truly rocked by the implication of Beth's death or by the struggle to save his daughter is lost. Instead, he is given his golden moment to shine early in the film when Mitch is shocked by Beth's death and anyone who has seen the trailer has already seen that. After that, Mitch protects his daughter as best he can, but before he can ever be truly impacted by anything going on around him, the movie shifts focus.

I have had a terrible record this summer of picking the winner for the weekend box office. But where I went into Contagion convinced this would oust The Help at the domestic box office, now I am utterly unconvinced it has the stones. The movie is slow, dry and while it seems very real - outside how fast a vaccine is developed - it never pops, it is never entertaining. And it is virtually unwatchable as a result. Judging by how neutral the theater I was in seemed after the fact, I know I am not alone in this assessment.

For other works with Laurence Fishburne, check out my reviews of:
Predators
Armored
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Mission: Impossible III
The Matrix Revolutions
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix

5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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