Improbabilities abound in cheap thriller 'Trade'

Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and "Trade" happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking. So they're made for each other: a wildly overwritten thriller about a shamefully underreported problem. The film brings us the story of two separate road trips that terminate in the same New Jersey house. One is conducted by Manuelo (Marco Pérez), a Mexican crook who's helped kidnap a group of girls and young women and a boy from Thailand and is now dragging them on foot and by van from Mexico to whoever has bought them in an online auction.

The other trip involves Ray (Kevin Kline), the Texas fraud cop who helps Jorge (Cesar Ramos), the young Mexican con man who just popped out of his trunk, to rescue his abducted 13-year-old sister (Paulina Gaitan). Why Ray agrees to do this makes no sense, but his wife (Linda Emond), whom he calls once in a while, goes along with every ounce of it. She's mourning their dead cat, and he's chasing his own melodramatic demons.

The director, Marco Kreuzpaintner, has no problem sensationalizing the rapes, beatings, and other tragic developments, while treating the cop and con man's trip to the Garden State with the chummy icebreaking of a buddy movie. But the script, by Jose Rivera, who wrote "The Motorcycle Diaries," was adapted from a controversial 8,500-word New York Times Magazine story about a house in Plainfield, N.J., where four Mexican women between the ages of 14 and 17 were held captive and forced to have sex.

The story was accused of being problematically impressionistic. The movie is problematically desperate to entertain at the expense of logic. Manuelo violently insists one of his hostages pose sexily, like a fashion model, for his camera without waiting for her to stop blubbering or wipe the dirt from her face. At some point, two of the captives break free then make inexplicably stupid decisions that get them recaptured. And the filmmakers want to find the apparent madam behind this operation so superhumanly nasty on top of her already nasty scheme that you root for her comeuppance, not as a matter of moral justice so much as the cathartic requirement of a thriller. This isn't an indicting work of journalism about an ugly global industry with an American hub. It's a rigged public-service announcement girdled into the demands of a very cheap thriller. You might leave wanting to fight sex trafficking, but you'll want to take a long shower first.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.