Traffickers Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

Traffickers Blu-ray Movie Review

Coma-dose.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 24, 2014

Robin Cook’s Coma played upon a perhaps natural fear of going into a hospital and submitting to surgery by positing a whole nefarious bureaucracy dedicated to providing unwilling (and unwitting due to those titular mental states) organ donors. Traffickers, a 2012 South Korean potboiler attempts to exploit much the same plot premise, though it does so from a somewhat unexpected point of view—that of one of the organ traffickers himself. The fact that film plays out largely in the confines of a supposed cruise ship may only tend to play on another element in popular paranoia, courtesy of any number of nightmare news reports of various behemoth ships providing a breeding ground for various outbreaks of disease and, in certain cases, malfeasance by captains and crews.

Traffickers begins with a viscerally exciting and effective sequence that sees a bloodied and wounded man scrambling through the fluorescently lit hallways of—well, is it a hospital? No, it turns out it’s a rather decrepit looking freighter of sorts, at sea but with an odd group of passengers riding as well. The man, who has a large gaping wound in his side and is bleeding profusely, makes it to the deck,where he’s obviously wary of two men. One of them tries to grab the guy, at which point the wounded man stabs him with a scalpel. The two scuffle and tragedy ensues, all under the horrified watchful gaze of the other man whom the wounded man was trying to steer clear of.

The film segues forward three years to find that man, Yeong-gyoo (Lim Chang Jung), who is the middle man in a large smuggling operation that sees various mules (usually women) attempting to ferry things like illicit drugs into Korea from China. An opening scene shows quite explicitly how vicious Yeong-gyoo can be when he’s crossed, as he takes an elderly woman named Auntie to task for hiding some of her ill gotten gains. However, Yeong-gyoo is not the master of his own destiny, due to the incident three years previously. He is out of the organ harvesting business, something that the opening vignette detailed the unhappy ending of years ago, but he’s deeply in debt and also deeply in love with a young woman named Yoo-ri (Yun-hie Jo). Yeong-gyoo’s machinating boss Dong-bae (Seung-hwan Shin) convinces his underling to do one more organ harvesting job, though Yeong-gyoo is unaware that the job is actually for Yoo-ri, whose father needs a transplant to survive.

Already it should be obvious that Traffickers is a dense tale that interweaves various characters in an increasingly incredible way. And the above précis doesn’t even get into the proposed victim of the organ harvest, a wheelchair bound woman named Chae-hee (Jeong Ji-Yoon) whose milquetoast husband (Daniel Choi) has arranged for them to take a cruise to China together. That’s right—we’re right back where we started, on a sea liner of sorts that’s also home to a vicious gang of kidnappers and organ thieves. It’s also not much of a spoiler to reveal that these two characters end up having connections to the rest of the characters, including one supposed major twist in the film’s last half hour or so that may indeed come as a surprise, but which makes little to no sense upon further, non adrenaline fueled, reflection.

Director Kim Hong-sun (who also co-wrote) keeps things moving well enough, but the film is weighed down by its very preposterousness. And while it’s obviously disturbing to see an already handicapped woman drugged and threatened with being vivisected alive, the film is ultimately surprisingly tame, offering few if any outright chills. Performances are generally quite good, with Choi offering a nice spectrum of panic and (later) something “completely different” as the film starts to reveal unexpected connections, which are patent contrivances when you get right down to it.

A number of unexplained plot threads are never properly addressed in Traffickers, though the film makes a pretense of tying everything up with a couple of quick vignettes that play out interstitially between the closing credits. Traffickers offers a couple of jolts of excitement along the way, and its premise, while derivative, is bound to play on people’s angst without even really trying. Transplanting (sorry) the story to a ship is one of the film’s few innovations, but even that gambit can’t keep Traffickers completely afloat.

Traffickers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Traffickers is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. Shot digitally with the Red One MX, the film is often breathtakingly sharp and well detailed, especially when Kim and DP Yun Nam-ju exploit extreme close-ups (as evidenced in some of the screenshots accompanying this review). The level of detail may lead to squeamishness on the part of some viewers once the knives and scalpels come out and various characters are sliced and diced to within an inch of their lives (and sometimes beyond). The palette is surprisingly natural looking for this kind of thriller, with very little overt color grading. That said, a number of sequences play out in floridly lit spaces like hallways, leading to minimal though noticeable banding at times. Contrast and black levels are both solid, and there are no signs of problematic digital tweaking of the image.

Traffickers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Traffickers' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is a surprisingly robust and nuanced affair, with regular surround activity engaging the side and rear channels from the first sequence. What's also notable about this mix is its extreme dynamic range, for this is a film that doesn't browbeat its audience with nonstop audio effects, and instead leaves ample breathing room in several key sequences where nary a word of dialogue is spoken. Fidelity is excellent and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Traffickers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:13)

Traffickers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If Traffickers had pared down its somewhat ungainly cast of characters while also editing the number of increasingly improbable connections between them, some of the better thriller elements of the film probably would have had a chance to shine more than they end up doing here. The film is simply too convoluted for its own good, something that exacerbated by a series of denouements that are supposed to cause shock and awe, but often come off as simply confusing. There's enough gut level uneasiness here to entertain adrenaline junkies, though, so some may find this worthy of a rental. For those considering a purchase, technical merits are very strong, even if the supplemental package is virtually nonexistent.