One was a crack by the habitual dissenters at the Washington City Paper that Traffic was basically a soap opera. The other was my own suspicion that a movie so lavishly hyped for revealing the ugly truth behind the drug war would be insufferably didactic. Well, the folks at the City Paper were right.
Traffic is basically a soap opera.
Not exactly The Young and the Restless . Traffic flirts with preachiness as well. It soap-operatically divides itself along several minimally intersecting story lines, which are introduced to us in distractingly expository fashion. The hint of preachiness quickly dissipates, however. Once Traffic finishes introducing its scenarios and distributing its themes, it attacks its different story lines with the tenacity of a Rottweiler, and lingering concerns about preachiness are not so much gainsaid as totally forgotten.