"Traffic" is one of the most pretentious, boring and ham- handed films to be made by an art film director in a while. The thing that's so damn funny about it is that director Steven Soderbergh has a knack for making all his glittery pretense look subtle. It's a sucker's game of a film. The kind of thing that makes film school students drool on their pantlegs.

Consider the TV-movie-of-the-week script, a boring and elongated panorama of racist drug related tales that has not one new idea involved. Michael Douglas is trapped in the typical "my daughter is on drugs" film but he swims upstream against it anyway. This idea was done much better, and much more interestingly 20 years ago in Paul Schrader's "Hardcore," except that film was wise enough to throw much more lurid sex into the mix. Also designed for optimum dramatic effect, Douglas' character is the newly appointed Drug Czar for the United States. Get the irony? He's the new drug czar but his own daughter is a runaway junkie... Oooohhhh.... that's smart!

Then there's the typical cops protecting an informant scenario where the talented Miguel Ferrer, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman are totally wasted. At least Soderbergh is smart enough to hire the best. Catherine Zeta-Jones, aka Mrs. Douglas, gets the meat of the plot here, playing a nouveau rich wife and mother who slips into the dark side. This stuff wasn't interesting on "Starsky and Hutch" and it ain't interesting here either.

And there's the stereotypical and drab Mexican drug cartel storyline where good-guy-cop Benicio Del Torro has to deliver lines like, "You like base-a-ball? I like base-a-ball. I want lights for parks so kids can play base-a-ball. I like parks." God - it's sad. The fact that the plethora of talented actors here are reduced to such lameass dialogue is infuriating.

The sad thing about this storyline is that it treads on stereotypical racism where all Mexican cops are corrupt, all Mexico is corrupt, all Mexicans are drug dealers, all Mexico is a shithole. Soderbergh films all the scenes in the country in shimmering gold implying that the heat has totally diseased the country and made it devoid of sanity and goodness. It's racism tarted up as artsy-fartsy pretension. Then there's the scenes in the America urban landscape where all the black kids are drug users and drug sellers. Soderbergh even has the balls to place a 16 year old white girl in bed with a naked black man who is so muscular and virile that he recalls "Mandingo." It's putrid and unacceptable racism. The NAACP should picket the theaters where this trash plays. And then there's the typical gaybashing cinematics where Del Torro easily picks up a gay Mexican assassin by simply putting a condom in his cigarette pack where the gay man can see it. It's disgusting and degrading homophobia that yet again implies that all gays are evil (the only gay guy in the film is an assassin for Chrissakes) and all gay guys have casual sex with strangers that they meet in bars. It's repulsive. The only group Soderbergh doesn't demean here, besides whites of course - who are victims, is Lithuanians I believe. Every print of this film should be burned by outraged people who are not white heterosexuals.

There isn't a single frame in this film worth seeing. I can't believe I wasted two and a half hours of my life on this colorless, drab, tedious, offensive piece of shit. Soderbergh should go back to directing simple little art films. Give him a budget and he masturbates all over the camera spewing his venomous hatred off non-white heterosexuals all over the screen like so much middle aged white man cum. It's degrading and repugnant.

That so many critics are fawning all over Soderbergh and heaping accolades on this film is a sure sign of the apocalypse. That so many big name stars tripped over their peers to be included in this film is yet another sign that Hollywood is a corrupt and evil place that will hopefully one day fall off into the ocean and sink like the stinky turd that it is.

The worst part of this film, other than the dull plot and the overt racism, is that it does nothing to truly discuss the drug problem in America. It hints at a few ideas but promptly sweeps them under the carpet with it's want to appear subtle. Not once is the legalization of drugs even remotely considered or discussed. There are a few speeches, Topher Grace's dialogue about the black community to Douglas, Ferrar's speech about the futility of his DEA job to Cheadle, that hint at problems but no one ever suggests anything that remotely resembles a solution. The film throws up it's hand and suggests that there is no solution. Maybe it is correct in doing this but any high school kid could tell you that. Of course, this film's script might possibly have been written by a high school student. It's certainly sophomoric. The script also does not delineate between marijuana, coke, heroin or crack as different drugs. They are all evil, evil, evil. Please. Perhaps it wasn't a high school kid but my mom who wrote this script?

If there is anything worthy in "Traffic," then it is it's wonderful ethereal soundtrack by Cliff Martinez. Buy the CD and smoke a big fatty. It will blow your mind. This is good and trippy stuff. A Brian Eno tune is even included. At least Soderbergh is wise enough to select the best music possible for the film.

But alas, it's films like this that make me think maybe were walking backwards after all. Shame on you Steven. I expected more from you. Perhaps your brain was addled by all the prop coke on the set. Your a sell-out!

Note:

Also with Albert Finney, James Brolin, Benjamin Bratt, Dennis Quaid, Steven Bauer, Erika Christensen, Amy Irving, Peter Riegert, Salma Hayek and several US Senators appearing as themselves.

Script by Stephen Gaghan based on the UK miniseries "Traffik" by Simon Moore.

Soderbergh is the DP but uses the pseudonym Peter Andrews.

The White House scenes were filmed on the set of the TV series "The West Wing."

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