Traffik - Miniseries

Traffik - Miniseries

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Movie Reviews of Traffik - Miniseries

Movie Review: smarter than the movie...
Summary: 5 Stars

In terms of its cinematography and visual language, the movie is clearly better. Despite Amazon's review, I still thought the acting was better in the Hollywood version, that the miniseries had the production values of your typical middle-brow BBC miniseries.

That being said, the miniseries is far superior in terms of its overall vision and story. Soderbergh inevitably had to cut some things here and there to edit the story down to three hours, but the result is a somewhat less nuanced take on the drug war. For instance, both highlight the futility of supply-side-only approach to the drug war, that treatment and other demand-side approaches are necessary. But the miniseries has a much more accurate depiction of the tedium and frustration that's involved with the international politics of the war on drugs, rather than those 80's war on Columbian cartels movies, where the solution was to send a crack team of CIA agents into the jungle and kill all the bad guys. (Admittedly, this is probably more understandable to an American audience than the negotiating of a foreign aid deal.)

The miniseries also carefully focuses on the economic implications of the drug trade and the role of the crushing poverty in the countryside of Pakistan and a corrupt government. Who is the good guy: the local government that refuses to build roads and schools or the opium trade, which provide the people a means of sustenance on otherwise unarable land? Not like the cartels are angels, either. The heads of the cartels are protected by their bribes while it's the poor workers from the countryside who are pinned as the fall guy when the government makes the sporadic crackdown. Indeed, the greater tragedy of drugs isn't the tony prep-school girl hooked on smack, but rather how economic inequality leads to this kind of systematic exploitation.

Soderberg seems to underestimate his American audience's capacity for nuance and ambiguity, replacing this entire plotline with some hackneyed plot of warring cartels. Indeed, one of the more frustrating things about the movie was how Soderberg thought it was necessary to spell out his point in flashing neon lights. For instance, when that mid-level drug dealer seems to quote the policy paper from some left-wing think tank about how "you can stop me, but you can't stop all of us" or when Michael Douglas's character is wandering through the slums of Cincinnati with a prep-school addict who so eloquently expounds on inner-city poverty, this is simply unrealistic dialogue.

(This underestimation of American audiences is probably justified.)

Despite the fact that the movie lifts so many of its scenes from the mini-series, I still highly recommend people who have seen the movie to see this mini-series. It really is a significantly more intelligent and detailed look at the the so-called war on drugs.