Major Spoilers
Trade treads a precarious line between serious-minded social drama and thriller with only partial success. While it is extremely gripping and harrowing for much of its running time and manages to expose the obscene trafficking of children and women for the purposes of prostitution without sensationalising, it does suffer from some serious lapses in logic and a final reel that is as close as you well get to seeing a decent film self-destructing.
Kevin Kline plays Ray, a middle-aged policeman searching for a daughter he believed was another man's. Cesar Ramos is Jorge, a 17-year-old Mexican grifter fleecing tourists in Mexico city, whose 13-year-old sister is abducted by slave traffickers while riding the bicycle he bought for her with his ill-gotten gains. Their paths cross on their individual searches and, while the trail of Ray's daughter has long grown cold, Jorge's little sister is still capable of being saved.
I was hooked early on. The storyline quickly establishes the main characters (although Kline's could have been introduced earlier) before submerging the viewer in a brutal world of abduction, rape and human slave trafficking. The story unfolds with a pace that is both compelling and harrowing as inhumanities are heaped upon Jorge's sister and a Polish woman lured to America with false promises of a new life (well, not so false when you think about it). About halfway through, though, the film starts to wobble, with previously intelligent characters making dubious decisions that really leave you feeling let down.
Until the final reel, though, the film is still reasonably believable, and we still care about what happens to the characters. Until Manuelo opens the door to check on Ray and the girl, that is. That's when credibility is abandoned with unseemly haste and a ludicrous Hollywood ending tacked on to an otherwise worthwhile film. I mean, really. The guy has been transporting humans across the border, selling them into sexual slavery for God only knows how long, and the pleas (and veiled threat) of one small girl is going to provoke a change of character? Even given all the subtle signs throughout the picture, it's a development that's incredibly difficult to accept. In reality, Manuelo would have seen exposing Ray as an impostor as a way of redeeming himself for allowing the Polish girl to commit suicide and recovering most of the money he lost from her sale by allowing the young girl to be re-sold once Ray was dealt with.
Anyway, once this miraculous change of heart has occurred another takes place with the timely arrival of the NYPD just at the moment they are needed (as, I'm sure, they always do arrive in the nick of time, sirens blaring only when they're one corner away, in real life.
It's such a shame that the ending was so poor, that the writer couldn't think of a more believable final act but I guess, having painted the police as a corrupt, uncaring bureaucracy a number of time throughout, he felt obliged to plant them on white horses for the final scenes.
Trade treads a precarious line between serious-minded social drama and thriller with only partial success. While it is extremely gripping and harrowing for much of its running time and manages to expose the obscene trafficking of children and women for the purposes of prostitution without sensationalising, it does suffer from some serious lapses in logic and a final reel that is as close as you well get to seeing a decent film self-destructing.
Kevin Kline plays Ray, a middle-aged policeman searching for a daughter he believed was another man's. Cesar Ramos is Jorge, a 17-year-old Mexican grifter fleecing tourists in Mexico city, whose 13-year-old sister is abducted by slave traffickers while riding the bicycle he bought for her with his ill-gotten gains. Their paths cross on their individual searches and, while the trail of Ray's daughter has long grown cold, Jorge's little sister is still capable of being saved.
I was hooked early on. The storyline quickly establishes the main characters (although Kline's could have been introduced earlier) before submerging the viewer in a brutal world of abduction, rape and human slave trafficking. The story unfolds with a pace that is both compelling and harrowing as inhumanities are heaped upon Jorge's sister and a Polish woman lured to America with false promises of a new life (well, not so false when you think about it). About halfway through, though, the film starts to wobble, with previously intelligent characters making dubious decisions that really leave you feeling let down.
Until the final reel, though, the film is still reasonably believable, and we still care about what happens to the characters. Until Manuelo opens the door to check on Ray and the girl, that is. That's when credibility is abandoned with unseemly haste and a ludicrous Hollywood ending tacked on to an otherwise worthwhile film. I mean, really. The guy has been transporting humans across the border, selling them into sexual slavery for God only knows how long, and the pleas (and veiled threat) of one small girl is going to provoke a change of character? Even given all the subtle signs throughout the picture, it's a development that's incredibly difficult to accept. In reality, Manuelo would have seen exposing Ray as an impostor as a way of redeeming himself for allowing the Polish girl to commit suicide and recovering most of the money he lost from her sale by allowing the young girl to be re-sold once Ray was dealt with.
Anyway, once this miraculous change of heart has occurred another takes place with the timely arrival of the NYPD just at the moment they are needed (as, I'm sure, they always do arrive in the nick of time, sirens blaring only when they're one corner away, in real life.
It's such a shame that the ending was so poor, that the writer couldn't think of a more believable final act but I guess, having painted the police as a corrupt, uncaring bureaucracy a number of time throughout, he felt obliged to plant them on white horses for the final scenes.