I would like to make an announcement that will shock and frighten some of you. Crack use among film critics is currently out of control. Yes, I know it. s hard to believe such a stable, well spoken group of people could have the big ugly crack monkey banging on their heads, but it must be true. How else does one explain the awesome reviews that Traffic has been receiving?

Isn. t it ironic that a movie about the drug trade will expose many a film critic as a crack head? I don. t mean to disrespect crack heads with this comment but it must be true. Normally I don. t dedicate my column to bashing one film but this week is an exception.

Let. s just break this movie down and it will all be clear. The movie is actually four separate plots that all end up interweaving into the climatic finish (allegedly). The problem is only a crack head would actually believe three of the four sub plots. I won. t bust loose with a fist full of plot spoilers here, but few whoppers of bad story telling need to be discussed.

Ok, we are asked to believe that the Drug Czar. s daughter is a smack head. I can handle that part, but only a crack head would buy Mike Douglas driving around in his neighborhood ghetto looking for his daughter until he finds her. I won. t even get into Douglas. s attempts to talk to drug dealers and other smack heads.

Then we have Catharine Zeta Jones and her plot line. Here is a woman that doesn. t even know her husband is a drug dealer until the feds haul him away to jail. With that foundation laid, only a crack head would believe Jones reviving her husband. s drug business for the good of the family and for the love of her husband.

There is an entire witness assassination plot that comes up. This portion is so cliched you would think a crack head wrote it. We are talking every bad witness protection cliche in the book. Watch out for the waiter with the poison food--you will want to scream as you watch this crack wagon over turn.

Special crack head attention must be given to bad filming ploys. Only a movie school drop-out or drug abusing film critic would think it was cool that all the Mexico scenes are filmed with a special washed out look. If you have never seen a European film you might really be impressed, but here at filmdudes we know better. Cheap trick to mask a bad script. sorry, we noticed.

Traffic would have been a revolutionary movie in 1988 when no one knew the drug war was being lost. But guess what, no one in 2001 is surprised by what this film is saying. Hell ,all the film critics who liked this film were too busy with their crack pipes to notice how bad this movie really sucked.