Checked out the new “city folks go to the country and run into trouble” suspense film Traffik. That’s Traffic with a K… probably because there was a Traffic (about the drug trade) in the early 2000s… not that anyone will confuse them… not because they are different but because nobody is gonna see Traffik, let’s get real.
Traffik stars a young black couple who take a weekend trip to a friend’s house in the country. I thought they were a bi-racial couple because the woman is very light skinned and the film was dark… and this matters later in the movie. In movies where city folk wind up in the country, they usually run afoul of hillbillies, zombies, cannibals, or all three in one. In this film, they just run afoul of local bikers and then the film evolves into a kind of home invasion flick. The bikers are trying to get into the vacation home because (long story) our heroes wound up with a satellite phone. A phone full of evidence that the bikers are human traffickers.
The film goes from a suspense film to a sordid, seedy exploitation film. It gets uncomfortable and icky with people injected with drugs and threatened with rape. It’s a different tone than the start of the film… but it ain’t got nothing on where the film goes next.
Because the movie has the audacity to pretend to be taking sex trafficking seriously. It even – and I gave a middle finger to the movie at this moment – plays Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday during one of the later scenes. Movie, you haven’t earned the right to play Strange Fruit… especially when you are a cheap exploitation movie and when I thought your female lead was Italian (you know, a dark skinned white person). But then I realized maybe she was black… at which point the movie got even ickier.
Look, probably putting too much thought into this nowhere movie, but having a film about sex slavery starring a white woman vs. a black woman has separate connotations. Playing Strange Fruit – a song about lynched black men – also has different connotations.
Either way, the movie is just kind of gross and unseemly and I’m ok with that if the movie knows what it is. If the movie is honest with itself and the audience. This movie pretends to have a Very Important Message that it in no way earns. It gets earnest after spending ninety minutes being a generic suspense film and then a gross, seedy one.
All this might have been ok, in a way, if the movie was actually good. But it really isn’t. The suspense rarely works, the acting is sometimes terrible, and the tone just keeps pinballing all over the place. Not that you were going to see the film… not that you’d ever even heard of it… but don’t bother with it.
Score: 64