Syriana could well be called Traffic 2, or perhaps Traffic Deluxe. It's more ambitious than Traffic although about 20 minutes shorter, thus making the movie feel packed to the gills in terms of material/narrative to cover. No less than four major storylines, a handful of minor threads, and something like a gazillion characters are crammed in here.

As Syriana bounces from one plotline to another, the scenes clip by, and if you missed something in the last conversation, well, too late, you better pay attention to the upcoming one or you'll miss that one too. It's intimidatingly intelligent, definitely not a time-waster, and challenges the viewer to keep up. But  mashing in so many stories also serves to weaken the film as a whole -- few of the plotlines gain resonance and although the screenplay makes many attempts to humanize the main characters, only a few of them might really stick with you.

Stephen Gaghan, screenwriter of Traffic, directs his own screenplay here; he apes Steven Soderbergh's style (sans color filtering) and pulls off the documentary or obsevational tone quite well, but in trying to put in too much in just two hours, he loses much of the weight of his characters and narratives. Compare this to Traffic, where the major characters carried a heat you could feel and remember; by comparison, Syriana's roles for George Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, and Matt Damon (who probably comes out the best here) feel slight.

Once again, in a film like Syriana, the weight of the subject matter makes up for this -- Gaghan goes after nothing less than international oil politics, tracking the tangled web of corruption, power plays, and human cost from the lowliest field workers to CIA grunts and law firm middlemen to Middle East royalty and the American oil corporation bigwigs. The gravity in its focus makes this film closer to the movie  The Constant Gardener should have been. I wish it had taken more time -- if it were somewhere between two-and-a-half to three hours, it might've been able to flesh out its characters to emphasize more of the human quality it so clearly strives to convey.

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated "R" for violence and language.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.