Home | Anime | Movies | Soundtracks | Graphic Novels
Traded
Score: 15%
Rating: Not Rated
Publisher: Cinedigm
Region: A
Media: Blu-ray/1
Running Time: 98 Mins.
Genre: Western/Drama
Audio: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA
Subtitles: English SDH

Features:
  • Five Minutes to Dodge: The Making of Traded
  • 2 Deleted Scenes With & Without Commentary

The premise of Traded sounds interesting. It's 1880's in dusty Kansas and a happy father and husband has tragedy befall his family, resulting in his daughter being kidnapped by sex slave traders. He must find her and "he has certain skills," if you know what I mean. Then I watched it...

Former sharpshooter, now rancher Clay (Michael Pare) and his wife Amelia (Constance Brenneman) live a happy enough life on the prairie, with young son Jake (Hunter Fischer) and teenage daughter Lily (Brittany Elizabeth Williams), until a tragedy happens in the family. Lily decides she wants to become a Harvey Girl and work at the famous restaurant, so she runs away to audition in Wichita, but ends up getting picked up by a smooth talker named Rig Marlowe (Joshua LeBar) and eventually sold into sex slavery to a rotten man named Lavoie (Tom Sizemore), although not before passing through a few hands... all in the span of a day. One of those men is town pimp and Fire Chief Ty Stover (Trace Adkins), who trades the girl for a shiny new fire house bell. What??? Ok, whatever. Moving on.

So Mom and Dad figure out that Lily has left in the night when she doesn't turn up for breakfast, and Clay sets out to retrace her steps, or those of her horse, actually, and try to catch up with her train to get her back. He goes to the train station and beats the hell out of the ticket seller there, who was actually a really creepy guy and a ridiculous actor. He then catches up to the train and gets into fights there, getting badly injured and being rescued by a girl named, um, Girl because she is "too ugly to have a name." She is actually pretty, but has a weird rash on her face. Just sayin'. He gets into a fight with her pervert father, then continues on to town, making his way through every lead he can find on his daughter, and subsequently, I might add, shooting them to death before they can give him more info. He literally kills everyone he comes into contact with, save a few whores, BEFORE getting the needed info. Good sharpshooter (I guess - he killed them all at close range, so maybe not so much), bad detective.

There were times when I literally looked around the room to see if there were cameras, in case I was being punked watching this movie. The acting is so bad and the pacing is terrible. Literally everything happens so slowly, even the fighting and what is supposed to be action is boring. Kris Kristofferson plays a rangy old bartender named "Billy" according to the credits, although I don't recall him ever identifying himself, so maybe he was supposed to be Billy the Kid? Either way, he was stiff in his role as well.

I honestly can't recommend this movie to anyone, even someone who really loves Western films and/or the Taken movies. I felt like I wasted my time and I will avoid anything directed by Timothy Woodward, Jr. in the future. I think he must just have a pile of money and makes movies for fun, just without any skill in the craft. Even the making of and deleted scenes didn't really give anything back. The deleted scenes were just weird (although one at least explained the ending) and the making of just made me wonder where the funding comes from for these projects. Uwe Boll step aside. We have a new winner.



-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications
AKA Ashley Perkins
Related Links:


This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Firefox.