Baby Sellers

This was actually pretty good especially when the story left (fake) San Francisco (Vancouver) and moved internationally. I got particularly caught up in all the victims stories; a young girl in south America who is told her blond haired, blue eyed newborn has "died" along with several victims in India as well as the desperation and loss of the American families, attempting to adopt. All the secondary characters did a great job here.

This is a (Lifetime) TV movie but not as cheesy as usual and could actually function quite well as a TV series. Jennifer Finnigan is good as a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) detective, determined to bring down a ruthless international kingpin who controls a worldwide baby-selling operation.

After losing her partner in a bust gone bad (which also results in a truckload of trafficked pregnant women and live babies)'Nic' goes undercover as a perspective adoptive parent, travelling to India and becoming entwined with a family whose baby has been stolen.

Kirstie Alley plays the black market baby operator 'Carla Huxley' and is suitably nasty, preying on the desperation of the perspective adopters while remaining ruthless and treating babies like cattle. The ending is slightly abrupt but a decent made for TV movie. 3/17/15

I have a hard time understanding why some producers pick people from Hispanic cultures to play Brazilians. Brazilian accent can't be imitated by Hispanic people, neither by the Portuguese unless they have Brazilian parents or have lived for a long time in Brazil. Or else that will never work. Brazil is a large country located in South America with 200 million inhabitants these days. The USA territory is only large than Brazil because of Alaska and Brazil is the only country in the whole South America continent with its distinct Portuguese language. Despite the Portuguese influence, just like in America, where the English is no longer British, Portuguese spoken in Brazil is nothing like Portuguese spoken in Portugal. "Brazilian Portuguese" is influenced by Greek and mostly Italian, so it sounds for Americans almost like Russian. Americans are usually surprised when they listen to Portuguese. Having said that, stop calling us Latin because we speak a language which was Latin because Canadians are not French or British and Americans are not British. This movie is OK, only OK.

While newborn babies are sold in faraway places like India, others near their destination for upscale American customers. In San Francisco, tough Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) detective Jennifer Finnigan (as Nichole "Nic" Morrison) closes in on a truckload of live babies and pregnant women. She loses an partner in the process. Determined to bust black market baby operator Kirstie Alley (as Carla Huxley), Ms. Finnigan goes undercover as a prospective buyer...

This starts out looking very ordinary and loses some of its believability in melodrama, but turns out to be an exciting and thoughtfully told tale. Produced as a "Lifetime" TV Movie, "Baby Sellers" (a descriptive, but exploitive title) could almost be a major feature film (as "Road to Love") starring someone like Jodie Foster. In the lead, Finnigan performs exceptionally. Direction by Nick Willing and editing are skillful, with only minor occurrences of the distracting "shaky camera" look...

Ordering her adopted daughter to eat a salad with "no dessert," Ms. Alley is deliciously nasty. The largely unknown group of supporting players is impressive, with our emotions naturally focused on victims Arjun Gupta (as Dilip Patel) and Nicole Munoz (as Dolorita Da Silva), plus sleazy Zak Santiago (as Rafael Ochoa). The socially relevant point is very well made. We are supposed to feel empathy for the these characters, and writer Suzette Couture certainly gets the job done.

******** Baby Sellers (8/17/13) Nick Willing ~ Jennifer Finnigan, Kirstie Alley, Arjun Gupta, Nicole Munoz

The film was "Baby Sellers," billed as a "world premiere" Lifetime showing of a quite powerful and well-done thriller from producer Robert Halmi, Sr. (he and Halmi, Jr. are known for socially conscious TV-movies) which had some of the usual Lifetime sillinesses and improbabilities, but had enough energy and power to transcend them. The star is a young, compactly built blonde woman named Jennifer Finnigan, who plays Detective Nicole ("Nic") Morrison of the (presumably fictitious) "Homeland Security Investigations" law-enforcement agency, or HSI. When the film starts she and her male African-American partner (alas, not identified on the cast list on IMDb.com) are hot on the trail of Rafael Ochoa (Zak Santiago), a crime kingpin involved in a number of illegal enterprises, including smuggling undocumented immigrants into the U.S. in the backs of large trucks. The film actually opens in a small village in India, where kidnappers literally steal Mira, the recently born baby of a young couple, Dilip (Arjun Gupta) and Noureen (Veena Soud), who can recognize her if they see her again because she has a tear-shaped birthmark under her left eye. Then it cuts to the U.S., where Nic and her partner almost catch Ochoa's agent but the agent and Ochoa himself escape. They do, however, recover the truck in which they were smuggling in their latest batch of undocumented immigrants — pregnant women. Ochoa is shipping them into the U.S. so they'll give birth on this side of "la linea" and therefore the kids will be U.S. citizens; then the babies will be taken away from their mothers and placed with wealthy Anglo families for adoption.

At the crux of all this is an adoption agency with the typically smarmy title "Road to Love" run by Carla Huxley (Kirstie Alley) — and I can't help but think writer Suzette Couture deliberately named her after an author whose most famous work is "Brave New World," a novel about the mass production of babies. Huxley delivers a well-honed sales talk to prospective adoptive parents in which she trots out her own Third World-born adopted daughter Alyssa (Corale Knowles) and tells what a wonderful success her own adoption has been — "My mom is awesome!" Alyssa tells her mom's prospective customers, before we get a scene between the two of them in which Carla turns out to be a tough taskmaster with an obsessive concern about her daughter's diet. Directed by Nick Willing, "Baby Sellers" flits confusingly between the U.S., India and Brazil (another important stop on Carla's baby-selling network), and at times you have to look closely to determine which Third World country with dirt roads, shaky buildings, grinding poverty and nut-brown people is which (some of the switches in location are indicated by chyron titles but most aren't), but it's generally well plotted and it's powered by fascinating female characters as both heroine and villainess. It's also a movie which, despite the sometimes confusing changes in locale, manages to tell convincingly tragic plot lines and avoid the soap-opera trap of too much blatant tear-jerking.

At the end there's a title about the impact of human trafficking, including the claim that it's now the world's second largest and most lucrative criminal enterprise (after drugs but before weapons), which reminds us that the Halmis were also the producers of the Lifetime movie "Human Trafficking," which, when I reviewed it for IMDb.com, I headlined my review, "Good intentions doth not a great movie make." I wouldn't call "Baby Sellers" a great movie, either, but it's far better than "Human Trafficking;" it's not only a fast-paced, exciting thriller (we open in the middle of a chase scene instead of getting the usual 20 to 40 minutes' worth of dull exposition typical of Lifetime's thrillers) but it has two great tour de force roles for women. Kirstie Alley is absolutely brilliant, capturing not only the character's evil but the smarmy self-righteousness and gooey sentimentality with which she conceals the evil not only from the people she interacts with but from herself. And she's matched by Jennifer Finnigan, who manages to be just as tough as Mariska Hargitay in "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" without being either as self-consciously butch or as annoyingly schoolmarmish. Finnigan's combination of little-slip-of-a-girl appearance, implacable will and surprising toughness and skill with the action scenes is remarkable, eminently watchable and makes me wish the Halmis and Lifetime would get together and build a series around this remarkable actress and her character here.

This movie deals with the themes of child and infant trafficking, so it's very dark and intense. At the same time, it is solid insight into this awful criminal enterprise. It's very serious, so don't watch unless you're in the mood for that.