It is a performances centric movie

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Human borders regardless doing bad or good are visible with difficulties. When I think about Mexico, first associations are food (for example burritos), mariachi and sadly so many news about brutal murders. This movie is about Mexico and some good people (Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas) trying to find people involved in killing many woman workers from factories near border with USA. This is movie about huge deviation in Mexican society. Origin of this deviation is poverty in all aspects,mental, material, human... Mexican governments are solving this problem with military and corrupted police, without trying to deal with cause. Because of that you have " domino effects " on Mexican border with USA. We have two people putting their career way ahead lives. From mine point of view, it's stupid and wrong but this is moral victory for them. They are trying to do something impossible from their position but if it is possible to change position everything is possible. One life of good person is lost. Put your life in front of career, because career may trick you that it is life. Don't be tricked. When you realize career is not life, life can become your career. This movie is like life not so easy to watch, but good for thinking about...

There can be a special elegance to a movie that touches the human condition honestly and with clarity. Add to that the harshest of unrealized economic realities and you have Bordertown, a film just as significant to our future as to our past. For it shows us in the least compromising terms, what the trends of today are creating for the reality of tomorrow. It is a movie this reviewer had thought would never be made. Not since Apocalypse Now, has Martin Sheen delivered his role so magnificently. As the newspaper editor, George Morgan, his delivery of lines in a particular scene (summing up these aforementioned trends,) is comparable with that elegant rendering of Sir Richard Burton when that late great stands before the bar to indict a system showing neither fairness or justice to his client in the Medusa Touch.Jennifer Lopez as Lauren Adrian, an investigative reporter sent into a story neither her editor or her can imagine in scope, IS the part. Revealing just how capable she is with character delineation, Lopez excels beyond all expectation. Had this performance been on the stage, five minutes of "bravo" would have ensued at curtain. Writer/director Gregory Nava is to be applauded on every score, not the least of which is his courage.This reviewer does not say this easily nor lightly: If adequately promoted for what it was worth and for the import of its message, this movie might have changed the course of history if made a decade earlier. It still might make its mark in helping to remedy the economic and political madness now placed on the world's table. Highly, highly, highly recommended. JCH

I'm amused of how good actress Lopez was in this movie. She worked a thousand times better here than in the fresh "The Back-up Plan". Bordertown shows a corrupt systems which protects rich people and doesn't give a da** for poor people. Just like many countries on Earth. I found some plot holes that kind of disappointed me: 1. Why didn't Lauren carry a knife when she got in the bus to catch the driver? You know, just in case 2. Why didn't Lauren call Domingo when she started noticing she was taken to another place? 3. Why did Eva look to the killer in prom in a direction he could see her back? Why didn't she go to somewhere he wouldn't be able to see her and then asked Lauren to picture him clearly? Despite that, the drama was so real and present in my country that I found myself wanting to punch the rapists so bad. The movie showed how some people have a sense of justice and want to help random people as much as they would help their relatives. By the way, I laughed very hard with her angry "You goddamn lousy fu**er" or something like that hahahah.

This is not the kind of movie I usually see, and I must admit that while watching it on TV, I gradually realized that it was not the documentary film I expected. The story is based on a horrifying and tragic reality of raping and killing of women on the Mexican border, of which I did not know anything, as underreported throughout the world. The movie has so the laudable merit of bringing to light and denouncing the terrifying drama of thousands of women being raped and disappeared in those waste lands, working in those appalling "maquilladoras", where even the most basic human rights are completely disregarded, and where deep economic interests prevail over respect for human dignity. However, as the story progressed, I realized it was more an action-thriller than a documentary picture, standing out for gripping though improbable, twists, a tense and quick pace, intertwined with some more relaxed and relaxing moments, which appear as really improbable and above all of bad taste and out of place if we consider the grave topic of the movie. It is as if that worthy aim gives way to more entertaining and market needs. So my doubt was: how can such a highly committed movie be bent to the logic of the box-office? How can you shift your attention from scenes of rape of terrifying violence to the underlining of J. Lo's perfect silhouette? It is evident that the production aimed at attracting audience through an attractive cast and some shrewd devices, such as pacing action, a thriller-plot, sentimental flash-backs, some entertaining music, thus losing its seriousness and credibility. I watched it till the end, because it was gripping and, like all thriller movies, you want to know how it ends up, but I realize this is not the reason why I should have wanted to see it till the end, and in this sense I think it is, in the end, a failed movie.