Rosanna Arquette stars in Trading Favors as an escaped convict who shacks up with an uptight, high-school senior (Devon Gummersall) and proceeds to lead him on a wild, multi-state crime spree. An uninspired cross between Private Lessons and Something Wild, Trading Favors doesn't so much shift gears as much as lurch erratically from one genre to another: It begins as a addle-brained teen sex comedy—Gummersall's two high-school chums seem to have wandered in from some latter-day Porky's sequel—and decides about a half-hour in that it actually wants to be a mismatched-lovers-on-the-road film before running out of steam and staggering into unconvincing psychodrama toward the end. Even more erratic than the film's wildly careening plot is its non-existent grasp of its characters' psyches: Arquette's character starts out as the prototypical horny teenage boy's wet dream, then goes through a series of unconvincing transformations that suggest not that her character has untold levels of depth, but that the filmmakers grew bored and couldn't be bothered to maintain any level of consistency. So instead, Arquette's character follows a seemingly random arc from criminal sexpot to misunderstood, mixed-up loner, to tragic victim. There's something kind of sad about watching an actress of Arquette's stature play the Shannon Tweed role of direct-to-video temptress. Though this sort of cut-rate B-movie material might have been entertaining had it realized that it is irredeemable trash, Trading Favors instead has a solemn, almost mournful tone that renders it especially insufferable.