The acting is more variable than in Soderbergh's recent films. Cheadle and Guzman have a workaday likability, the familiar rhythms of two cops who have settled into the permanent state of being harried. Douglas, at first, seems to have been chosen merely because he has that conventionally handsome look of our younger elected officials. But he manages to show some passion in the scenes where he's trying to locate his daughter.

And as the daughter, Christensen (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Julia Stiles from some angles) is remarkable. She plays off the mess she's sinking into against the character's lack of worldliness, and she uses her look (like the baby fat still clinging to her cheeks) to suggest a girl who remains unformed. I wish that the script didn't provide her with such a conventional reason for the character's drug abuse (she's unable to cope with the pressure of being a straight-A student) or offer her a false, hopeful ending.

Best of all is Del Toro, with his perpetually sunken eyes. He has the kind of look that directors have heretofore used for crooks and crackpots. The stroke of casting him here is that his weary, unshaven countenance masks a straight-arrow hero, a guy who tries to come on as wised up, but desperately wants to believe that fair play and honor are still possible. And though the plot involving him is unfocused, the least well told of the four, Del Toro's portrayal of a growing sense of futility in a man with a strong belief in right and wrong carries it. In some ways it carries the whole movie. He's one of those rare actors who can make moral disillusionment seem attractive.

"Traffic" is a failure of a very high order -- a movie that takes a gutsy stand and displays real filmmaking savvy but simply isn't as exciting as it should be to watch. The best that can be said for it is that, in its best moments, it manages to display a canny ambiguity.

In the end the movie comes down to the smile of satisfaction on Cheadle's face as he pulls off a scam that will begin to turn the tables on a drug dealer no one has been able to nail. Cheadle's smile, that of the wiseass good guy who has put one over on the villain, is everything that action movies and thrillers have taught us to love. Soderbergh makes it seems like the foolish essence of our drug policy, the emblem of people not just doomed to repeat their mistakes, but willing.

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