How to personalize the immorality of global prostitution seems clear enough: You create characters who represent the full human spectrum in that particular world. And by involving the audience on a dramatic level with these fictional players, you engender a powerful moral consciousness about the issue.

That's certainly the strategy and underlying purpose of "Trade," Marco Kreuzpaintner's often graphic rendering of the chain of exploitation and misery in so many young women's lives around the world. Thus, we meet Adriana (Paulina Gaitan), a 13-year-old Mexican girl who is kidnapped and pressed into an international sexual ring; her older brother, Jorge (Cesar Ramos), who makes it his mission to save her; and various other exploiters, middle men (and women) and victims of the network. This motley company includes Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a Polish girl stuck in the same situation as Adriana, who decides to take her own action, and Ray (Kevin Kline), a Texas Ranger on his own moral mission, who joins forces with Jorge.

Unfortunately, "Trade," which screenwriter Jose Rivera ("The Motorcycle Diaries") drew from a New York Times investigative article, is a jarring amalgam of documentary-like drama (which often reprises the bleak tone, but not the heft, of "Maria Full of Grace") and contrived story coincidences that keep Jorge forever on the elusive trail of his sister, from Mexico to New Jersey -- without being detected. Worst of all, the movie resorts to the hokiest of buddy movies, as newfound partners Jorge and Ray josh and bicker with culturally flavored repartee we'd expect in a comic road movie. 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.

-- Desson Thomson (Sept. 28, 2007)

Contains violence, sexual brutality, profanity and themes of pedophilia, underage prostitution and involuntary drug use.