An effective weekend-from-hell thriller with a vital message, a terrific lead performance by Paula Patton and some unexpectedly dimensional storytelling from writer-director Deon Taylor ("Meet the Blacks").

It’s kind of hard to know where to begin with what’s wrong in Traffik, a movie where every scene takes about twice as long as it feels like it should, and the characters far too often make an escalating series of implausible and/or stupid decisions.

Trying to figure it out makes Traffik weirdly compelling, but nowhere near good.

Noble intentions are derailed by deeply confused execution in writer-director Deon Taylor’s Traffik, which attempts to marry cheap genre thrills with an unflinching depiction of the horrors of international sex trafficking, only to cheapen the latter and cast a grimy pall over the former.

An attractive cast led by a vibrant, all-in Paula Patton and spiffy visuals courtesy of renowned cinematographer Dante Spinotti make the sleaze and predictable plotting go down a bit easier than they would have otherwise, but there's still no disguising the project's fundamentally lurid underpinnings.