Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
American corporations are using the North American Free Trade Agreement by opening large maquiladoras right across the United States–Mexico border. The maquiladoras hire mostly Mexican women to work long hours for little money in order to produce mass quantity products. Lauren Adrian, an impassioned American news reporter for the Chicago Sentinel wants to be assigned to the Iraq front-lines to cover the war. Instead, her editor George Morgan assigns her to investigate a series of slayings involving young maquiladora factory women in a Mexican bordertown.
Bordertown tackles the real-world tragedy of the Ciudad Juárez femicides with earnest political intent, giving it a certain moral weight and topicality. The plot is serviceable but leans on familiar investigative-journalist thriller conventions, and the narrative momentum is uneven. The acting from Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas is competent but rarely transcends the material. Cinematography is functional with some effective border-town atmosphere but nothing visually distinctive. The subject matter gives it a degree of novelty in mainstream cinema but the approach is fairly conventional for the social-issue thriller genre. The ending feels rushed and unsatisfying, failing to deliver a cathartic or dramatically coherent resolution to the weighty issues it raises.