Tracers (2015)
Directed by Daniel Benmayor
No — Tracers is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Tracers arrives from 2015, a year in which a studio could still release a parkour picture starring Taylor Lautner and expect the culture to shrug.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes several actors of Asian descent (Johnny M. Wu, Wai Ching Ho, Doua Moua) playing Tong and Vietnamese gang members, but this is conventional genre casting with no commentary or deliberate representational intent.
Nikki is a capable parkour athlete and there is a backstory involving her being sexually assaulted, but she functions primarily as a love interest and damsel-adjacent figure; no feminist thesis is advanced.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The film features Chinese and Vietnamese criminal organizations, but race is never examined or commented upon; the gangs are stock action-movie antagonists.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
A loan-shark debt drives the plot, but it is a personal stakes device rather than a critique of capitalism or wealth inequality.
No body-positivity themes or messaging appear in the film.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a straightforward contemporary action story with no historical revisionism.
The film offers no social messaging or moralizing; it is a B-movie action vehicle built around parkour set pieces.
Why it received this score
Tracers arrives from 2015, a year in which a studio could still release a parkour picture starring Taylor Lautner and expect the culture to shrug. Daniel Benmayor directs with the efficiency of a man who knows the assignment: bike messenger, debt to the Tong, a beautiful stranger who leaps between rooftops, a corrupt DEA agent, a bag of diamonds. The film spends most of its runtime on foot chases. It has no thesis, no message, and no interest in improving anyone. In this genre, that is almost a virtue.
The representational ledger is thin. Johnny M. Wu, Wai Ching Ho, and Doua Moua appear as Tong enforcers and Vietnamese gangsters, which is the standard casting arithmetic of the American crime film and nothing more. Race is present as scenery and never as subject. Marie Avgeropoulos's Nikki can climb a wall and outrun a patrol car, but the screenplay assigns her a sexual assault in backstory and then files it away as motivation for her brother's temper. She ends the film as a passenger in a restored Pontiac, which is where the genre has always put her. The romance, such as it is, follows the standard blueprint.
Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. The loan shark debt that drives the plot is a personal stake, not an indictment of lending or capital. There is no environmental conscience, no meditation on bodies, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical argument. The gangs are stock antagonists, the Russians are stock antagonists, and the DEA man is a stock antagonist in a windbreaker. The film lectures no one about anything, which may be the most honest thing about it. A quarter century of cultural criticism has nothing to grab here. We are left with Lautner learning parkour and a car that gets restored. The classification is swift and merciful.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Wanted by the mafia, a New York City bike messenger escapes into the world of parkour after meeting a beautiful stranger.
Questions about Tracers
Is Tracers woke?
No — Tracers is not woke, scoring 7 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Tracers have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 15.
How does Tracers compare to other 2015 movies?
It ranks #183 of the 289 films from 2015 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Chi-Raq (78).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.