Review of Traffic

Introduction

Steven Soderbergh had the unique honour of being nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar this year - for Traffic and for Erin Brockovich. Many pundits thought that this would split the vote, handing the award to Ridley Scott for Gladiator, but Traffic won the coveted prize.

Rather than the usual Hollywood linear plot, Traffic has numerous stories running parallel, all culminating in one eventual outcome. We`ve a Mexican policeman (Del Toro) fighting the drug cartels, a number of DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agents after US drug dealers, the US drug czar (Douglas) trying to stop the flow of drugs into America, whose daughter is also an addict and finally the wife of an arrested dealer (Jones) trying to rebuild her life. You`ve certainly got to be paying attention!

Video

Video comes in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and as you would expect from a film made last year, the video is of a high standard…however…as stylish as it may be, I am not a fan of the over exposed grainy look of the scenes shot in Mexico, of the blue tint applied to some of the early scenes set in America. I would have been much happier had I been presented with a consistent picture throughout the film.

So, the above said, when the image is "normal", the picture quality is very good, with no grain and no dirt anywhere to be seen.

In places, the film has a documentary style rather than the usual glossy Hollywood look, and for this film it works, smooth camera pans for example would look very out of place given the context.

Audio

The soundtrack is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, however you certainly wouldn`t know that if you hadn`t read the back of the box. Traffic is not a film that is, or needs to be noisy - too much sound would detract from the viewers concentration and enjoyment of the plotlines.

Traffic is a film that concentrates mainly on dialogue, and luckily this is very clear and understandable throughout the film.

Features

For such a successful "high profile" film the range of extras on offer is disappointing. For example, a film that won the Oscar for Best Director, why is there no Director`s commentary? Cynics would suggest that we will see a "special edition" in the future with more extras…

Instead we are provided with trailers, TV spots, behind the scenes footage "Inside Traffic" and a photo gallery - a very rudimentary selection.

The film is packaged in a black Amaray case which, contains a four page colour insert containing production notes and details the almost unbelievable 68 chapter breaks!

Conclusion

Overall, Traffic is a very good film hampered in my opinion by two factors. The first is the 2 hour 27 minutes running time, which could have been trimmed down to 2 hours to keep thing tighter. I also felt that Michael Douglas` character was weak - I didn`t find his family situation particularly credible. This part of the plot could have been edited considerably and the film would have benefited from it - the movie started out very interesting, but started to drag slightly towards the end.

The film is very well made, even if I`m not a fan of some of the visual aspects - for the most part the cast play their parts very well, and Douglas is good as the Drug Czar, although his character at times is weak. Video and sound are good, but the extras are a disappointment and I`m sure we will see a "special edition" in the future with a Director`s commentary and some proper documentaries.

On that basis, this is a film that probably isn`t worth importing from Region 1 - waiting for the Region 2 edition to arrive in rental shops is probably a better idea, then buy a future version that is better value for money.