Parents' Guide to Traffik

Though it may have had good intentions, this movie is ultimately ineffectual, unpleasant, and borderline offensive; it's a vicious thriller that fails in its attempts to convey serious messages. First, Deon Taylor's Traffik involves characters and situations that don't resemble life; people behave in ways that are puzzling, apparently only to further the plot. (Brea's newspaper reporter job seems especially out of touch.) And when the tension starts, characters start making all of the usual horror/thriller mistakes that are always so frustrating. In the end, the movie doesn't seem to care about any of them, at all, one way or the other.

The movie's villains are as generic as they come, with a sneering bald guy as the leader and several bearded biker thugs who are indistinguishable from one another; if a good guy dispatches one of them, it means nothing. There's a "twist" that's as unsurprising as it is dumb, and, finally, like one of the so-called movies in the "torture porn" subgenre, it comes close to reveling in the brutal treatment of women -- its images of women in skimpy clothing covered in grime and blood toe a very fine line between alluring and repulsive. Finally, Traffik closes with a handful of titles with factoids about human trafficking, as if to distance itself from, and rise above, the vile stuff it has just shown for "entertainment" purposes.