If only the whole matched the power and potency of the details. Masquerades as a searing exposé, but turns out to be a lurid and overwrought account.
Trade (2007)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 65
Fresh: 18
Rotten:47
Average Rating: 4.7/10
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
As cinema, ‘Trade’ is flawed: the script is functional and the dry characters are hemmed in by the machinations of an unremarkable plot.
Such difficult subject matter requires a harder-edged delivery, but hopefully this accessible drama will therefore get its message across to a wider audience.
This cockeyed odd-couple road movie is well-intentioned, but it comes perilously close to feeding off the crimes it condemns.
Is it possible to agree with what a film is saying while disliking the way it says it? Trade leaves no arm untwisted and no message unrammed.
Kline and the talented Gaitan do their best to engage on a human level, but ending with various sobering stats about the global sex trade only underlines the film’s woefully misplaced dramatic emphasis.
Jose Rivera's script plays uneasily, as do some of the directorial flourishes: the shots of rose stems and caged birds are galumphingly emphatic at moments that need no underlining.
With terrific performances and strong direction throughout, this hard-hitting thriller delivers a powerful wake-up call.
This involving film is weakened by a script that tries to create a formulaic thriller out of an important subject matter.
Trade is a dreadfully hollow film, empty of everything except pretension and self-importance posing as art.
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.
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.
Yes, a conventional documentary about sex slavery would probably be more illuminating. It would also be more unbearable.
Trade has cojones for trying to lay the kind of political guilt trip it does on us with its sham aesthetics and lurid telenovela-writ-large storyline.
What ultimately tips the scales is its determination to avoid sentimentality.
The filmmaker tries to keep the energy up and the audience engaged by incorporating stylistic touches from the Michael Bay 101 crib sheet, whirling the camera around characters in crisis and lacing scenes with hack guitar rock.
Grim, hard to take, and nightmare-producing, Trade is not for the faint of heart.
Latest News for Trade
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September 20, 2007:
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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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