This flick was close, oh, so close, to not making the cut for Shitty Movie Sundays. We have an informal slogan here at SMS: Not every shitty movie is bad, but every bad movie is shitty. Skin Trade, from 2014, is not a bad movie. It’s better than mediocre. It’s damned entertaining and on occasion dips its toes into being good. It’s a cheapie action flick that one has to actively scan for its failings. It’s the ersatz stuff that sealed the deal. The poor CGI muzzle flashes and blood spatters; the poor CGI backgrounds in driving scenes; the poor CGI explosions and fire. Yeah, it was mostly the poor CGI. It was a symptom of this flick’s low budget and the willingness of the filmmakers to take shortcuts. I wouldn’t say that it doomed this flick to a spot in the Watchability Index (because inclusion is an HONOR), but a little more flexibility in director Ekachai Uekrongtham’s budget would have worked wonders.
A joint Thai-Canadian-American production, Skin Trade follows a pair of protagonists who come together to defeat an international sex trafficking ring. One of the heroes is American special agent Nick Cassidy (Dolph Lundgren, who shares screenwriting credits with Steven Elder and Gabriel Dorwick). The other hero is Bangkok detective Tony Vitayakul (Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa, in his first movie in the west). 
Together they go against the Dragovic family, a Serbian crime organization led by the ruthless patriarch Viktor (Ron Perlman).
Viktor’s background is brutal. He was a colonel during the Yugoslav Wars and was acquitted of genocide after a war crimes trial at The Hague. Afterwards he moved into organized crime and built a global empire comprising parts of the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Not too shabby. But now, he, and his four sons, have to go.
The formula Uekrongtham used is this film’s success. He went with lengthy action set piece after lengthy action set piece, never leaving much time for the audience to catch its breath, or the pace to slow down in favor of detailed exposition. He’s a shower, not a teller, and that works well in action flicks. Details, motivations, and grievances are addressed with action rather than words.
Uekrongtham also handed a lot of responsibility to his fighting star. Jaa’s fight scenes don’t reach the manic and unending intensity of the more well-known flicks from the region, but they’re more than audiences in the west normally get. The standout is a fight with Michael Jai White, who plays Reed, an FBI agent. That fight alone does a lot of work to make this movie watchable.
Lundgren had a lot to do, as well. Some suspension of disbelief is required, as Lundgren was not a swift man when he was young, much less at fifty-six years old. It was amusing to watch his character outrun much younger and fleeter pursuers. The cherry on top was a scene where Dolph is riding a dirtbike, and only then is he unable to escape from a pursuer on foot.
I’ve been dancing around the details of the plot, and there are reasons for that. There are a few twists and turns that are predictable and somewhat cheap, yes, but they are twists that deserve to be told by the movie and not by some back alley movie critic.
Skin Trade was never intended to be more than a workaday, low-budget action thriller. For whatever reason — actual talent, a sense of camaraderie amongst cast and crew, or this being something of a passion project for Lundgren (he began the writing process in 2007) — this flick came together and exceeded what it should have been. Lest readers come away from this review thinking this is an overlooked would-be blockbuster, read that last sentence again. Skin Trade is better than it should be. It is still a shitty movie. Barely.
Skin Trade lands in the top third of the Index, taking over the #93 spot from Alienator.