Trade: Critic Reviews

As a movie, Trade is so-so, but as an expose of how the new globalized industry of sex trafficking really works, it's a disquieting, eye-opening bulletin.

Jose Riveraa(TM)s highly improbable and sensationalized screenplay leaves its actors no room for authenticity. Marco Kreuzpaintner directs with commendable energy, but squanders Daniel Gottschalka(TM)s gold-dust-strewn images on hyperventilating voyeurism

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.

By 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.

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.

The 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 cliches.

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.

The movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.

Comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

It gets high marks for its lofty intentions, but it is only mediocre as a thriller and is clunky in its presentation.

Grim, hard to take, and nightmare-producing, Trade is not for the faint of heart.

Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller.

A routine crime melodrama with art-house message-movie pretensions.

A straightforward and uninspired look at the sex trade.

The film's horrific and important subject matter is distilled into a lackluster lump of generic buddy-movie/road-picture components.

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.

This mostly effective dramatization paints a suitably ugly picture of the dehumanizing depths people are willing to go for money.

A brutal, shattering story of child trafficking that is intended to deliver a sobering punch about the global human trafficking trade, Marco Kreutzpaintner's powerful drama is in fact based on investigative reports in the New York Times.

Such difficult subject matter requires a harder-edged delivery, but hopefully this accessible drama will therefore get its message across to a wider audience.

With terrific performances and strong direction throughout, this hard-hitting thriller delivers a powerful wake-up call.

This cockeyed odd-couple road movie is well-intentioned, but it comes perilously close to feeding off the crimes it condemns.

If only the whole matched the power and potency of the details. Masquerades as a searing expose, but turns out to be a lurid and overwrought account.

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.