30
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Trade unflinchingly sheds light on a heinous crime. Yes, it's tough to sit through. But don't let that keep you away.
50
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
With 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.
63
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
The 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.
42
Trade 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.
67
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
As 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.
30
Little more than a slipshod, trashy, sometimes exploitative thriller.
25
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Anything 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.
38
Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.