A touch of the inflammatory is exactly what the movie calls for but lacks. It's not enough for "Traffic" to tell us that the war on drugs is a sham; the movie needs to declaim it with fury and a streak of bitter humor. Soderbergh shows a trace of wickedness when Sens. Orrin Hatch, Barbara Boxer and Charles Grassley appear as themselves in a Washington party scene. Did they read the script? Did they have any idea they were appearing in a movie that exposes as a sham the government's bipartisan war on drugs?

There's something bracing about seeing public officials side by side with their hypocrisy. But reason isn't a substitute for drama or passion. "Traffic" should be scalding; instead it merely makes a solid argument.

Nothing in "Traffic" is as exciting as the astounding interview in the current issue of Playboy with New Mexico's Republican governor, Gary Johnson. Johnson provoked a huge ruckus, and the resignation of several of his cabinet members, when he came out forcefully for the legalization of drugs. His interview in Playboy is shocking; he speaks with the plain language that we simply don't expect from our elected officials anymore.

For Johnson, drug legalization has nothing to do with party politics, or with the fact that the drug war hasn't worked, that we substitute lies for honesty in our drug education, that the legalization of drugs would be a death blow to organized crime -- for him, these are simply givens. There's no handwringing about the people who might be attracted to drugs if they become legal; he's worried about the people being destroyed by the efforts to eradicate drugs now: junkies who run the risk of unclean needles and unregulated dope, people caught in the crossfire of high-crime zones, everyone who is denied services because of the drain on our economy from uselessly fighting drugs. But reading the interview you get the sense that, for Johnson, laying out facts that many people (and most of his political contemporaries) would prefer to ignore gives him a thrill and a sense of mission.

Part of the problem with "Traffic" is a structural one. The separate stories simply don't build to a crescendo. You have to find the tempo again each time the movie switches scenes instead of being carried along at the same tempo (which, for all its flaws, is exactly what happens in "Magnolia").

The problem isn't exactly a failure of craft. It's hard to fault Soderbergh for the way the film has been made. Even his most obvious bits of technique -- like using a different film stock, grainy and light-blasted, for the Tijuana scenes -- work without calling attention to themselves. Often his choices, like the way things swim out of focus when Christensen freebases, feel exactly right. The hand-held camera feels alert without ever becoming jerky or ostentatious.

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