Overview: Hundreds of thousands of young women have vanished from their everyday lives-forced by violence into a hellish existence of brutality and prostitution. They're a profitable commodity in the multi-billion-dollar industry of modern slavery. The underworld calls them human traffic.

DVD Verdict: 'Human Trafficking' is a laudable production in its purpose — to alert the U.S. and the world to the existence of human sexual slavery and spark outrage and legal action,— but it simply isn't a very good movie at its cinematic core.

The script is horribly melodramatic and, though director Christian Duguay makes an effort early on to cue us carefully as to where the various locations are, as the film progresses and the cross-cutting speeds up it becomes confusing and starts to look like it was edited in a blender!

Robert Carlyle is an effective villain, but he'd have been better if the role had been written more subtly; as it is, one can't reconcile the depiction of him as a careful businessman with plenty of legitimate front operations to hide behind with the psychopathic pleasure in killing and inflicting pain he's also shown as having.

I mean, wouldn't the sheer body count among his associates start to alert people to him? Mira Sorvino is an O.K. heroine and Donald Sutherland makes a fairly good showing as her oracle-like supervisor, even though when he says he has some regrets in his life I couldn't help, but wonder if not doing the TV version of "M*A*S*H" was one of them.

For my money, 'Human Trafficking' is a really missed opportunity that tries to do too much. It genuinely seems to be attempting to do for sexual slavery what 'Traffic' did for the international drug trade; —and yet we see the victims suffering picturesquely, but don't really get more than an intellectual feel for their plight.

This mini-series also largely avoids the issue that some of the victims get trapped into the trade knowing they are going to become prostitutes. That is to say they know they are going to be prostitutes, they just don't realize just how horrific the conditions are going to be.

Besides, most sexual trafficking is on a considerably smaller, less expansive and harder-to-catch scale than the international ring depicted here. Ha, in truth, I half expected Robert Carlyle's character to be stroking a furry white cat! This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.