What is disheartening is that this movie has become controversial.  It shouldn’t be.  This review is going to avoid all of the political wrangling it has drawn. 

The subject of the movie is the growing social ill of human sex trafficking, especially child trafficking, and the movie does a wonderful job of engaging the viewer in the heart wrenching plight of innocent children.  And while that sounds very didactic, the movie is hardly just informative.  It is framed in the story of an action suspense, a mostly true life action suspense based an ex-Homeland Security agent named Tim Ballard whose mission in life has been to expose and incarcerate human traffickers.  Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, famously known as the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.  Here is the movie’s trailer.

The opening establishes the premise.  Two children, both less than ten years old, of a simple Honduran father are lured into a fake talent contest and instead of the glamour and riches of modeling are abducted and enslaved.  At some point they are sold off, the boy, Miguel, younger than the girl, to traffickers in Mexico and the girl, Rocio, to Columbia where they are both sexually exploited.

The story moves then into three phases, each progressing deeper into the heart of darkness of this evil.  The first phase shows Ballard, as Homeland Security agent, apprehending a pedophile through the internet and duping him to provide a child which turns out to be Miguel.  Rescued, Miguel tells Ballard of his sister, and Ballard through detective work finds she has been sold to parties in Columbia.  He convinces his boss to send him to Columbia to investigate the racket, and here in the second phase of the storyline comes across the criminal operation.  In time with little to show for it, Ballard is called back home.  In a fine scene—which the real Tim Ballard says actually happened—Ballard calls his wife to tell her his mission is ended unless he quit his job and go rogue, expecting his wife to implore him to come home.  The opposite happens; his wife implores him in the other direction, exhorting him to do whatever it takes to save those children. 

In the sleazy sections of whatever city in Columbia he is in (Bogotá? Cartagena?) he meets a seedy ex-convict who despite his otherwise morally ambiguous character is also personally convicted against child sex trafficking.  He goes by the nickname, Vampiro, and is played by Bill Camp.  The real Tim Ballard said that the Vampiro character really existed but went by the nickname Batman, and for copy write reasons the movie had to change the name.  Vampiro has perhaps the central line of the entire movie.  In a bar scene while swigging down liquor, he explains to Ballard why he risks his life trying to save these children, “When God tells you what to do, you cannot hesitate.” 

And so the two, Ballard and Vampiro, conduct a sting operation of a local group of sex traders and free some 54 children.  To their surprise, Rocio was not among the freed children.  They learn that she had been sold to a drug cartel that has encamped in a remote section of Columbia, and this leads to the third phase of the story.  With the help of the Columbian government, Ballard ventures into the encampment disguised as a doctor where he discovers a multitude of slaves picking coca leaves for the production of cocaine.  Here he comes to the heart of evil where sex and drugs and money and the enslavement of human beings for their ends meet.  Rocio is indeed there, and I will leave it at that to not give an ending spoiler away. 

Caviezel is masterful as Tim Ballard.  The conviction of his heart progresses with each step, and it is evident in every facial expression.  Bill Camp is convincing as a morally ambiguous crook whose heart has been changed with the discovery of the child sex trade. 

There are a lot of interviews with Caviezel and with Ballard and together.  Some of them are too lengthy.  Of the shorter ones to share, I thought this one with Ben Shapiro was the most comprehensive for just over nine minutes, and it never touches the politics.

If you haven’t seen it, go.  It will be memorable and a future classic.  When you do see the movie, take handkerchiefs.  Your eyes will be wet for half the movie.