A documentary about sex trafficking might have been more powerful. Dramatizing the subject in this fashion, with a race-against-time road trip, breathless online bidding and a couple of different happy endings, simply cheapens it.
Trade (2007)
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Reviews Counted:67
Fresh:19
Rotten:48
Average Rating:4.8/10
Consensus: With an exploitative style that seems more suited for TV shows like CSI, Trade's message about the reality of child exploitation is easily lost.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for disturbing sexual material involving minors, violence including a rape, language and some drug content
Runtime: 2 hrs
Genre: Kidnapping And Missing Persons, Thriller, Exploitation, , Crime/Conspiracy, Rape, Theatrical Release, Crime
Theatrical Release:Sep 28, 2007 Limited
Box Office: $118,086
Synopsis: At once soft-hearted and hard-edged, TRADE provides a compassionate look at an ugly world. In Mexico City, men kidnap13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) with the intent of selling her virginity to... At once soft-hearted and hard-edged, TRADE provides a compassionate look at an ugly world. In Mexico City, men kidnap13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) with the intent of selling her virginity to the highest bidder. Young Polish beauty Veronica (Alicja Bachleda) is held captive by the same men, and they threaten her young son across the ocean. As the criminals mistreat their victims, Veronica is Adriana's only solace as she is taken farther and farther away from home. Meanwhile, Adriana's older brother, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), begins to track his sister across the Mexican border into Texas and through the United States. On his mission, he runs into a Texas cop named Ray (Kevin Kline) who agrees to help him without ever really saying why. TRADE isn't escapist fare: it's a socially conscious film that doesn't flinch from the most painful of details about the sex trade. There's rape, pedophilia, and suicide, and the film doesn't look away or glance over the horrors. This is German director Marco Kreuzpainter's first film on these shores, but he works like an assured veteran. After working for decades in the film industry, Kline is often most highly praised for his work in comedies such as DAVE and A FISH CALLED WANDA, but he's quite adept in this serious drama. Young actors Ramos and Gaitan are making their major feature debut with TRADE, but they both communicate the fear and frustration of their characters with remarkable skill. [More]
Starring: Kevin Kline, Cesar Ramos, Alicja Bachleda, Paulina Gaitan
Starring: Kevin Kline, Cesar Ramos, Alicja Bachleda, Paulina Gaitan, Kate Del Castillo, Anthony Crivello, Zack Ward
Director: Marco Kreuzpaintner
Director: Marco Kreuzpaintner
Screenwriter: Jose Rivera
Story: Peter Landesman, Jose Rivera
Producer: Roland Emmerich, Roslyn Heller
Composer: Jacobo Lieberman, Leonardo Heiblum
Studio: Lions Gate Films
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Reviews for Trade
It labors under the delusion that it's this year's revelatory, eye-opening Maria Full Of Grace, when it's little more than a B-movie with an overwrought conscience.
Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.
Without making a message movie, the filmmakers have shed light on a serious yet underappreciated sociopolitical issue.
Yes, a conventional documentary about sex slavery would probably be more illuminating. It would also be more unbearable.
Such difficult subject matter requires a harder-edged delivery, but hopefully this accessible drama will therefore get its message across to a wider audience.
The movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.
A nasty, vile business, made more slimy because director Marco Kreuzpaintner doesn't trust the intrinsic interest of his story, and pumps it up with chase details, close calls, manufactured crises, and gratuitous scenes.
Trade's fictional drama is [hard] to believe, and impossible to justify.
However lofty the film's intent, it's hard to ignore the flaws in its making nor the protagonist's own criminality relative to a captor's religious hypocrisy.
Rarely has a message movie been as noxious ... manages to be not only contrived and culturally offensive, but also exploitative of the illicit practice it theoretically opposes.
Trade is a dreadfully hollow film, empty of everything except pretension and self-importance posing as art.
Takes forever to get anywhere and the ridiculous ending doesn't make it worth the journey.
Trade needed to be the United 93 of the human trafficking crisis. It's closer to being the World Trade Center.
Trade takes on a serious, under-addressed international crime against humanity in a style that is somewhere between TV melodrama and drive-in exploitation, undoing its obvious good intentions and some truly provocative moments.
Trade plays like a slightly more culturally aware episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
Ill-conceived and executed by German helmer Kreuzpaintner, Trade fails on every level, as expose of sex traffickers, as commentary on US ongoing illegal immigration debate, as portrait of innocent children violated by crime, and even as seedy thriller.
Latest News for Trade
September 27, 2007:
Critical Consensus: Game Plan Fumbles, Kingdom is Overthrown, Feast Is Semi-Appetizing, Elah Worth a Visit
This week at the movies we have parenting quarterbacks (The Game Plan, starring The Rock), FBI agents (The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner), lonely citizens... More...
September 20, 2007:
Critical Consensus: Chuck is No Good, Sydney White is No Fairy Tale, Eastern Exceeds Promises
This week at the movies, we've got cursed couples (Good Luck Chuck, starring Dane Cook and Jessica Alba), a collegiate Snow White (Sydney White, starring Amanda Bynes), the... More...
September 02, 2007:
Just misses making its urgent point, which was surely the purpose of this emotionally stirring, troubling film, by turning up the excessively convoluted melodrama, and turning its eyes away from the sociopolitical issues that sex slavery thrives on. ![]()
More...
September 02, 2007:
Trade diverts its enormously disturbing subject matter into its own apolitical comfort zone, where the reality is clear but resolutions clouded over. ![]()
More...
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