Traffic

If Traffic was the fiction version of the drug war, Cartel Land is the real thing. The access granted to director (and producer and camera operator) Matthew Heineman is stunning in its immediacy. Want to get in the middle of a gunfight between Michoacán Autodefensas and the cartels they’re hunting down? Probably not; good thing Heineman and his crew are there.

Cartel Land follows Autodefensa leader Dr. Jose Mireles as he encourages citizens of the Michoacán state to take up arms and fight back against the Knights Templar cartel. On the American side of the border, there’s a militia doing some hunting, too. The Americans speak in tones just as lofty as Mireles’s but sound dumber—probably because several of them spout racist bullshit openly. Charming.

As Mireles’s group begins to eat itself, gets drunk with power and becomes as big a threat as the cartels, the Mexican government gets involved, and that’s when things get dicey for the doctor. Cartel Land is a heartbreaking piece of cinema, it looks great and it exposes the drug war for it is: a big, stupid waste of time that costs billions of dollars and gets loads of people killed. Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Directed by Matthew Heineman

UA DeVargas 6

R
98 min.