The “nasty, vile” movie Roger Ebert hated watching: “When I left, I just didn’t feel right”
Everyone has sat through at least a handful of movies that they didn’t enjoy, and Roger Ebert suffered on that front more than most. Not that anyone should have felt sorry for him, since it was his job to watch virtually every major new release, and there are an infinite number of harder ways to make a living.
Very rarely would the distinguished critic walk out before the end credits, though, a distinction that was only afforded to a select few of the most reprehensible pictures he ever laid eyes on. However, there were still dozens, if not hundreds, of other titles that he loathed every second of, but persevered until the screen faded to black.
Watching one terrible movie is bad enough, and the thought of doing it repeatedly over decades is nothing if not daunting, especially when Ebert was regularly subjected to things like director Marco Kreuzpaintner’s 2007 drama, Trade, which sought to present itself as ‘A Serious Film About Serious Things’ and failed to achieve those goals.
Based on Peter Landesman’s article, ‘The Girls Next Door’, Kevin Kline plays a police officer who suspects that his estranged daughter may have been forced into a sex trafficking ring. He partners with Cesar Ramos’ Jorge, who’s looking for his sister after she was abducted by a similar group. A story like that should be handled with care and delicacy, but Trade didn’t manage it.
“A nasty, vile business,” Ebert remarked in his one-star review. “Made more slimy because director Marco Kreuzpaintner doesn’t trust the intrinsic interest of his story, and pumps it up with chase details, close calls, manufactured crises, and so many scenes of the captives being frightened and abused that they begin to seem gratuitous, even suspect.”
While he acknowledged that “it is evil that these gangsters, connected with the Russian mafia, terrorise young women and sell them as objects,” Ebert also asked a pertinent question. “But is it not also evil that the film lingers on their plights with almost as much relish as the camera loved the perils of Pauline, tied to the railroad tracks?”
Trade may have been given a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and was positioned as treating its weighty subject matter with the utmost tact, but Ebert was far from the only critic who questioned why Kreuzpaintner had taken a story that should have been the basis for a relevant, urgent, and thought-provoking drama and then treated it as something more akin to an exploitation thriller.
“What is the purpose of this movie?” Ebert questioned. “Does it manipulate its subject matter a little too much in its quest to be ‘entertaining’? Why should this material be entertaining? 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.”
By the time the 120-minute movie was over, he was feeling the full weight of what had become a two-hour ordeal. “When I left the screening,” he concluded. “I just didn’t feel right.”
