Great potential - unbelievably badly directed

Watched a preview of this basically because of the quality actors appearing in it and hoped for the best.

With Mickey Rourke, Michael Masden and Darryl Hannah you'd expect this to have the makings of a fascinating movie exploring the nasty world behind sex traffic and the plot, indeed, has all the necessary elements in place.

But the movie, as a whole, is utterly destroyed by the amateurish direction and atrocious cutting and assembly. Throughout there's a relentless, overpowering wash of background music that interferes with every conversation and removes any semblance of tension between the characters.

Frankly it sounds as though this barrage of background sound has been put there to cover up a pitiful sound recording. Whether they ran out of budget I don't know but there is no over-dubbing or re-recording and in many scenes there's a lot of extraneous noise behind the vocals.

In fact it looks, to me, as though the scenes with Michael Masden and Darryl Hannah were shot first as these are the best bits of the movie, splendidly acted and with far superior direction and cutting.

Otherwise the rest of the clips assembled around it would disgrace amateur night at the high school drama society. Given the talented actors, here, why the director couldn't manage to squeeze a good film out of this is totally mystifying.

It has all the hallmarks of being assembled in a rush by a director who's lost interest and is out of budget and time. With judicious timing to the scene cuts, a massaged soundtrack and, please, lose the background music, this could be an interesting movie. But, as it stands, it is truly terrible.