Human Traffic (1999) on Netflix
Five friends in Cardiff work jobs that only mark time until Friday night, when the clubs open. Jip, Koop, Nina, Lulu and Moff each carry their own trouble into the weekend.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.1/1029,875 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes59%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jip, Koop, Nina, Lulu and Moff are five friends in their twenties in Cardiff, and the weekend is what their weeks are for. Jip works in a clothing shop and calls himself a sexual paranoid. Koop, his best friend, wants to be a hip-hop DJ and is jealous of Nina, who is harassed at the fast food restaurant where she works. Lulu, Jip's closest female friend, has been cheated on by her last three partners. Moff has moved from London, sells drugs in a small way, and lives at home, where his father disapproves of him. Nina's seventeen-year-old brother Lee joins them for the Friday night out.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Human Traffic (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Justin Kerrigan only learnt about the project two weeks before its release was due, and joked that he had signed the copyright over to Niblo for a pound, never even saw the pound, and finished £25,000 in debt.
- Howard Marks appears and narrates the scene on "spliff politics"; Marks was a famous cannabis smuggler turned "motivational speaker" and author who wrote his autobiography, Mr Nice, about his criminal life.
- Stand-up comedian Jo Brand narrates the scene in which Moff, played by Danny Dyer, is on the sofa hallucinating and losing touch with reality; she had previously worked as a psychiatric nurse.
- The production's original budget of £340,000 eventually came in at £2.2 million, but the film was a financial success, grossing £2.5 million in the UK alone on top of good VHS and DVD sales.
- The US version cut scenes including Lulu dumping her boyfriend and the 1991 "Summer of Love" flashback, running 84m 14s against the original 99m 21s, a loss of just over 15 minutes of footage.
- Niblo removed from the titles all shots of the 1994 anti-Criminal Justice and Public Order Act demonstration and the riot that followed, eliminating the original's implicit political element, and also cut the more anti-royalist second verse of the spoof national anthem.
- Writer-director Kerrigan cast himself as "Ziggy Marlon", the Junglist dancer in Koop's record shop who asks "Any jungle in, guy?", and turns up in several other brief appearances throughout the film.
- Human Traffic is narrated by Simm, features numerous cameo appearances, is Danny Dyer's film debut and references another drug culture film of the era, Trainspotting.
