FAIR TRADE (1988) ** ½

Oliver Reed stars as a drug-dealing general in a fictional South American country who wants payback on the federal agent (Robert Vaughn) who imprisoned his son.  His elaborate plan is to wait for Vaughn’s daughter (Lisa Rinna) and her girlfriends to board a plane to go to South America.  Then, he has his men hijack the flight, kidnap Lisa and her gal pals, and gun down all the male passengers.  He then holds Lisa and the female passengers captive in his jungle camp, stating that if he son isn’t released, he’ll kill all the hostages.  Little does he know that Lisa is a badass, and she and her friends escape into the jungle to plot revenge on Reed and his men.

Reed snorts so much coke and drinks so heavily in this movie that you have to wonder if he was going Method on this one.  With his gravelly South American accent, greying hair, and bushy beard, he almost always looks and sounds like the Most Interesting Man in the World.  Reed doesn’t always pay his rent, but when he does, it’s usually because he got paid for starring in junk like this.

At one point, Reed says, “I’m chasing beach bunnies through the jungle.  How humiliating!”  It’s almost as if he’s providing commentary on his own career.

Fair Trade is all over the place.  It starts off as a hijacking thriller, and then it turns into a jungle variation on the Women in Prison genre, before giving way to a female Rambo movie.  While it isn’t exactly a sum of its parts, those parts are pretty rad.  Women are kept in bamboo cages, rapist guards are castrated, people fall into a piranha pit, Ninjas ride around on horseback brandishing machine guns, and lots of bamboo guard towers blow up. 

It sounds like Fair Trade should be a classic, but it just never comes together.  If you put all the boring shit in this movie on one side of a seesaw and the awesome shit on the other side, the boring side would be hitting the ground hardcore.  However, that awesome shit is pretty awesome.  How often do you get to see Oliver Reed suffocate somebody in a pile of cocaine?  Besides, is a movie that features exploding bamboo guard towers really all that bad?

Reed and Vaughn are clearly slumming.  (Vaughn must’ve filmed all his scenes in a single afternoon.)  It must be said that future Real Housewife of Beverly Hills (and Mrs. Harry Hamilin), Rinna equips herself better than expected.  She is credible in her action scenes and is convincing at being a tough action heroine.  She can’t quite singlehandedly save the movie, but she does save the hostages, so I guess that’s a… uh… fair trade. 

Director Cedric Sundstrom later went on to direct American Ninja 3 and 4. 

AKA:  Blood Ransom.  AKA:  Captive Rage.  AKA:  Fire with Fire.  AKA:  Fighting Fire with Fire.  AKA:  Fire on Fire.