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75Trade unflinchingly sheds light on a heinous crime. Yes, it's tough to sit through. But don't let that keep you away.
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75Though it's ostensibly a thriller, Trade constantly works against the conventions of its genre in a rather audacious way -- finding, for instance, surprising moments of humanity in even the most monstrous of its villains.
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70Trade works fairly well as a thriller ticking down to Adriana's auction. It's less assured when it strains for some buddy picture chemistry between Ramos and Kline. Though both actors are fine, with Ramos' performance being reminiscent of some of Diego Luna's English-language roles, the attempts at humor to ease the tension between Jorge and Ray and some of the speechifying are out of tune with the rest of the film.
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67As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an exposé of how the new globalized industry of sex trafficking really works, it's a disquieting, eye-opening bulletin.
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63Trade's wake-up call needs to be heeded, but its missteps detract from its devastating message.
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63Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.
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63The story's incredible coincidences, lazy cynicism and easy ironies recast a real-life horror story as easy-to-dismiss melodrama, complete with sequential "happy" endings.
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60An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film's near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.
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50The story of the victims on the road is harrowing, but the tale of the kind cop and the teenager with an attitude is a string of big brother clichés.
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50But improbable situations, heavy reliance on coincidence and an improbable climax nearly tip the film into TV-movie territory.
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50With a movie of this sort, the viewer expects to undergo something grueling and disturbing. Trade's inability to deliver that sort of visceral experience makes it unworthy of anyone's hard-earned dollars.
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50It points a determined finger (a middle finger, almost) at law enforcement, which cannot or will not recognize kidnapping victims in our midst, especially if they are undocumented and brown-skinned.
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42Trade is a pulpy Hollywood-style melodrama disguised as a harrowing message movie about Important Social Issues. 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.
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38Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.
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33You end up with a movie that takes that real problem and makes it feel like an exploitation contrivance.
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Trade is an earnest attempt to dramatize the network of Internet sex "tunnels." Unfortunately, the film's horrific and important subject matter is distilled into a lackluster lump of generic buddy-movie/road-picture components.
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It's pure exploitation--the kind of movie after which you need a long, hot shower. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like "Traffic" and "Syriana"--clearly his role models--but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's "Hardcore."
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30Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller.
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30By introducing silly elements into a serious endeavor, the filmmakers undercut their own movie. In the end, we're watching a somewhat exploitative movie about exploitation.
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30Kline gives an interesting performance playing against type, but with its action plotting and sensationalistic scenes of women being brutalized, the movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.
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25Anything that holds our interest can be entertaining, in a way, but the movie seems to have an unwholesome determination to show us the victims being terrified and threatened. When I left the screening, I just didn't feel right.
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Trade is a total misfire, a strange attempt at making a buddy movie featuring a morose Kevin Kline and a 17-year-old Mexican boy looking for his kidnapped sister.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 7
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Mixed: 1 out of 7
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Negative: 3 out of 7
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OA10This is the best picture of the year, no country was great but this film will bring tears to your eyes, its real, unflinching and captivating.
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ElmerR9
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JayB.9