Slave is a very morbidly vague movie, and that's what I loved about it, which made it very intriguing, but in the end it's really just a weak film. Some would say trashy film. Two honeymooners travel to Spain, where the father criminal of the groom resides. The first night while living it up in town, the girlfriend disappears. Now begins a frantic search which becomes an obsession to find her. The pacing of mystery here is excellent as we slowly learn she's the first to go missing. She has ended up on a boat, where an guy with a big scary looking beard runs a harem a girls, a sex slavery ring, all it as you will, where he gets em' drugged, and prepped for the clients, one of them we see, is disposed of cheaply. Like I said at the start, this film is morbid, be warned, but it's morbidly intriguing, but b grade fodder too. We do have some beautiful girls and a bit of bare bodied nudity, our lead actress quite gorgeous. Her POV as she weakens from her drugged stupor, as she's goes up deck and meets the other girls is sloppy. The criminal playboy too, proves a shocking revelation near the end of the film where too, the punishing end, on behalf of the boyfriend's fate kind of doesn't make sense, but if you look from the girlfriends point of view, it does. Purely this film is aimed at the undemanding, but too for some, it'll attract the crowd of a higher accepting audience.

I am a big fan of Taken, and so is the writer of this film! Except while one expects people to take inspiration from previous works to help them tell a story, this one just ends up being something of a crappy movie you see on TV once when you have nothing better to do.The opening premise makes you think "Well, this might actually have something to offer." At the very least I expected some nice eye candy to look at or maybe even some mindless action. Hell obviously this isn't going to be something classic like the Godfather or Citizen Kane but at least try to make the movie worth watching.The plot is as dumb as a bag of rocks. The characters are even dumber.I'll put the spoiler alert up at this point. Though I think you'd thank me if I didn't.***SPOILERS*** -If your girlfriend doesn't care about money and other things, why the hell would she care about what you look like when you're "old and fat"? That's a rather contradictory and shallow move. Sounds like she a shallow bitch to me.-Wouldn't it concern said girlfriend if you arrive in Spain and are greeted by a servant, a gorgeous house, and an absent father who allows you to screw on his bed while he's away? I mean any sane woman I know would view this as troubling at least.-If you arrive a club that is obviously seedy and are offered an unknown drug after your valet warns you not to use a cab, wouldn't you avoid the drugs at least? I mean that's just common sense. It's being safe not to take drugs when in a strange land that you are completely new to.-Bumbling around a town trying to find your girlfriend and messing with a guy who is armed and dangerous is apparently the way to do things. And this guy apparently has a degree. In what? Communications or Art Philosophy? It'd sort of redeem the film if he had some skills that actually worked to his advantage. Otherwise he just whines like a little bitch to his daddy and a cop who is being completely reasonable.-The mantra of the film is really stupid. If the moments that define a man happen when he's not in the area, then they aren't his defining moments. That's just trying to sound like some sort of Nick Cage line that falls even flatter than Cage's acting.In Taken we can suspend our disbelief relatively easily. It's not going to be some high-brow film but a simple action movie that covers things nicely. Even the few plot holes can be justified or overlooked because the story trots along nicely. We came to see Liam Neeson be awesome and shoot up bad men, not be a simpering wimp who meanders along the streets of a Spanish town.

There's a lot not to like about this movie. It is advertised as an exploitation movie, but it resembles the exploitation movies of the 1970's, just enough sex and violence to cover a two minute trailer. It also tries, but mostly fails to give the lead character much depth and realism.That said, it does a couple of things nicely. We do care about the lead female character and we do feel fear and concern when she is "taken." (Did "Taken" copy the phrase from this movie which was two years earlier?) Also, we do feel a sense of despair for the plight of the lead male character, who is helpless, but not really stupid (until near the end). There is some originally in the plotting, For example, the villain is a psychopathic Russian Muslim convert who doesn't kill people during the Ramadam fasting month. Tell me where you have seen that before? The cinematography and editing are commercially slick. It is nicely done for an ultra-low budget movie like this.One can't blame the filmmakers for disguising the film as an exploitation flick. A more honest description would be "an Albert Camus inspired existentialist meditation on the difficulty of holding onto love in the postmodern capitalist world." Probably, nobody would have seen it if they had advertised the film this way.

This tawdry, low-budget version of the Liam Neeson vehicle TAKEN makes the latter movie look like the Cadillac of the almost-deflowered-by-a-sheik genre. One must resist saying SLAVE qualifies as the Yugo in this category, since that would be unfair to Eastern European car makes. Almost every turn in SLAVE's plot is an implausible twist. Most lines of dialog fall flat. If the acting in SLAVE was passable, one could decry this feature as a waste of talent. Fortunately, the cast appears perfectly suitable to the low production values of everything they are given to work with. If I were forced to come up with a few DVD jewel box phrases that might amplify whatever SLAVE's title says to entice potential viewers into renting, I might try "pretentious claptrap" or "unmitigated boredom." There is probably a segment of the movie-watching public to whom these adjectives would sound appealing. My guess is that these masochists vastly outnumber those who would knowingly watch SLAVE if they were given a half-way accurate view of how miserable this feature actually is beforehand.