I’d love to judge this as just another b-movie in the same vein as _Taken_, but the constant dogwhistling towards its easily manipulated audience makes that impossible for me. By most academic standards, this film can be defined as a propaganda piece. That doesn’t have to be the be-all and end-all; _Top Gun_ is still an acceptable film despite questionable financial & script interference from the military. However, this thing is so clearly disingenuous and uninformed about its own subject matter, reducing a complex, global issue to weird looking pedo people & foreigners bad, white blonde Christian American good. I wouldn’t care as much if it was just a tight, unassuming thriller, but this thing clearly tries to have serious dramatic implications in its subtext. All of the emotions ring false, especially the scene where Caviezel’s motivation is revealed to be some divine intervention made me laugh really hard. The dialogue and acting are generally garbage, I can’t think of a single scene where I felt like I was watching something authentic because there is so little nuance to any of it. The score doesn’t help either, which is often overblown to comical proportions. The cinematography, on the other hand, is pretty decent and probably the best thing about the movie. Again, I’d welcome a real movie about child traffic, something in the same vein as _Sicario_, however I cannot get behind this bottom tier trash.

1.5/10