SEX TRAFFICKING is the theme of Trade, based on an award- winning New York Times article written by Peter Landesman. It begins in Mexico City where 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is abducted by Russian gangsters. Their other captives include a young Polish woman, Veronika (Alicja Bachleda), conned into believing that an agency has found her work in Los Angeles.
Adriana's older brother, Jorge (Marco Perez), a teen who robs gullible tourists, embarks on a quest to save her. We rightly suspect that this will double as a journey of personal redemption as he follows the trail to Juarez and over the US border. When Jorge meets a brooding detective (Kevin Kline) who specialises in insurance fraud, their initial antagonism suggests that it's only a matter of time before it evaporates into a bonding exercise.
Trade is most disturbing in illustrating how the internet is employed to auction the victims of sex trafficking. However, concerned and well-intentioned as the film evidently is, it is naive and laden with unlikely plotting and arch coincidences that undermine any conviction.
Kline is uncomfortably miscast in his underwritten role, whereas Bachleda arrests attention in the secondary role of Veronika. Born in Mexico and raised in Poland, she was chosen by Neil Jordan to star in his new film, Ondine, as the young woman who lands in the net of a West Cork fisherman, played by Colin Farrell.
Directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner. Starring Kevin Kline, Marco Perez, Alicja Bachleda, Paulina Gaitan. 16 cert, Screen, Dubiln, 120min, **
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