With the police on his trail, Nick follows Viktor to Thailand but is framed for killing a Thai policeman by crooked American cop Reed (Michael Jai White). Thai policeman Tony Vitayakul (Tony Jaa) is now after Viktor, even as Viktor tracks down Viktor and singe-handedly dismantles his human-smuggling business.
***
Skin Trade is a decent but unremarkable revenge B-movie. It's better than your average B-movie but with Dolph Lundgren starring in it, I was hoping for more. Fans of Tony Jaa who expect to see a lot of their hero will be disappointed. He has more of a supporting role here.
I'm a fan of Dolph Lundgren, who deserves more success than he has achieved. Like Jason Patric, he chooses good scripts that unfortunately don't become successful movies. I thought Joshua Tree/Army of One was good. I totally loved Silent Trigger (directed by Russell Mulcahy), a criminally-underrated action thriller.
Unfortunately, like Jason Patric, he also has his duds. Jason Patric has The Prince, Lundgren has The Minion.
Skin Trade isn't a dud, but I won't be buying the DVD. There is an interesting angle which makes it different from your normal buddy-buddy cop movie - Nick and Tony are on opposite sides for most of the movie. But there's nothing new here, nothing surprising (the motorcycle chase seems tired, cliched, obligatory), and quite a few leaps in logic.
The framing of Nick by Reed seems unnecessary. And how did Nick even know that the Thai police thought that he had killed the Thai cop? The police couldn't count the number of dead bodies in the fire? If the ship's captain knew that the container on his ship carried sex slaves, why didn't he do anything to make sure that they were kept alive? You keep people locked up in containers when the captain doesn't know what is going on. And you can't hear a conversation through a door, when your side of the door happens to be a noisy night club.
All of this chips at your voluntary suspension of disbelief, and soon you just want to see Tony Jaa and Lundgren fight each other. They do, and guess what? Tony Jaa doesn't whip Lundgren's ass. It's more of an equal fight. That's right. In this movie, Tony Jaa is not some martial arts superhero, just a cop with above-average fighting skills.
He does have some spectacular moves but most of the time he keeps things simple and believable. It's a good choice. I'm not a fan of too-fancy martial arts but I'm thinking that his fans will be disappointed.
