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TRAFFIK
Director: Deon Taylor Cast: Paula Patton, Omar Epps, Laz Alonso, Roselyn Sanchez, Missi Pyle, Luke Goss, William Fichtner, Dawn Olivieri, Lorin McCraley, Scott Anthony Leet MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:36 Release Date: 4/20/18 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 20, 2018 Traffik is a thriller that takes its sweet time getting to the thrills, and when they do arrive, there's no avoiding the uncomfortable feeling that the movie is exploiting a serious issue for some cheap thrills. The issue is human trafficking, and as a way of apparently atoning for the movie's tendency to brush aside the consequences of that real-life horror, writer/director Deon Taylor provides us with some numbers just before the end credits roll. It is, quite literally, the least that the movie could do. The plot mostly revolves around a romantic getaway for Brea (Paula Patton) and John (Omar Epps). John is planning to propose to Brea over her birthday weekend. Brea has had a rough birthday: Her editor (played by William Fichtner) at a local newspaper gave away a story she had been working on to another reporter, and she's more or less fired from her job. John's friend Darren (Laz Alonso), a sports agent, is going to let the couple use a house in the mountains that his company owns. There's some more drama: Some of it involves the lousy way Darren treats his girlfriend Malia (Roselyn Sanchez), but most of it is in how Brea is uncertain of marrying John. There's no particular reason for this. It's just some general anxiety and insecurity on her part. One gets the feeling that there's much more beneath the surface of Brea's character that was lost along the movie's path from page to the final edit. There's that uncertainty. There's the way that she breaks down crying on the night of her birthday, telling John that she doesn't know what to do with herself or her life at the moment. There's the way she instantly suspects that there's something amiss with a woman named Cara (Dawn Olivieri) at a truck stop along the highway on the way to the mountain mansion. Brea wishes she could have done something. Later, she confesses that the woman's face has been haunting her all night. It's difficult to guess such things, but when it becomes apparent that Brea has a difficult time telling John that she loves him, one gets the sinking feeling that Brea has experienced something in her past—perhaps something that would tie her story to the eventual human trafficking ring in which she, John, and their friends end up entangled. Maybe it's the not-so-subtle dialogue from Brea, in which she tells John on a couple of occasions that something had happened to her. Whatever this might have been, it was, apparently, unimportant to Taylor in the editing room or some studio folks after finding out about Brea's past. Instead of actually exploring this character and her obvious signs of emotional distress, though, the movie sticks to the more important things: the birthday dinner, the long drive to the mansion, a brief chase sequence on the highway, Darren and Malia's surprise appearance at the getaway house, and the drama that unfolds when Darren's jealousy reveals a past sexual relationship between his best friend and his current girlfriend—you know, the really important stuff. Taylor spends a lot of time on this, but eventually, the group of friends discovers that Cara left a satellite phone in Brea's purse. The phone has photos of Cara and other women—all of them emaciated and showing signs of physical abuse. Cara arrives at the mansion, looking for the phone, and she's not alone. Outside, there's a gang of goons, led by Red (Luke Goss) and illuminated by the brightest headlights on the market. They're willing to kill in order to retrieve the phone. The result is an unwinnable stand-off—since the friends are trapped in a house that was designed to look good, not to hold off an armed assault—and a fairly standard chase—through the woods, into the house of an uncommonly polite neighbor, back into the woods, and through a cavernous prison where the abused women are being held. Along the way, we get some overly clichéd complications to add to the minimal tension—uploading files to a computer, a car that won't start, the revelation of a hidden villain among the movie's limited cast. Some isolated moments are effective (a cat-and-mouse game in the woods and Brea hiding in a car), and Patton's performance does a lot to suggest that there's more to Brea than the movie actually gives us. There simply isn't much to Traffik, though, except for some routine sequences, a lot of unnecessary diversions, and the uneasy treatment of human trafficking as a gimmick. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for violent and disturbing material, language throughout, some drug use
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