Havoc (2005)

Wonderfully offbeat film!

Purely Joyful Movie!

just watch it!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

A slice-of-life about privileged, bored, hedonistic white kids who want a taste of street/gang life but get more than they bargained for is clichéd movie material by now, and "Havoc" is too short to develop the theme with much depth, but it has a harsh immediacy that probably comes from director Barbara Kopple's documentary background, and you can't take your eyes off it for a second. Anne Hathaway lets it all out (literally) in her breakthrough adult performance, and she is incredibly sexy. **1/2 out of 4.

I bought this on DVD very cheaply, almost exclusively because I thought the title was great. Checking the film out on IMDb upon my return home and I wondered if I would ever watch it. So many reviewers tell of the irritating way the male rich kids are always aping the gangster classes and the girls talking in that affected cluck-cluck way. The fact hip-hop does little for me looked like I was set for some fast forwarding. How wrong I was. This is one heck of a good movie. OK, I don't suppose every little rich boy is quite as silly as those depicted and same goes for the girls, BUT there is more than an element of truth here. Even as an oldie living in the UK, I am aware of kids speaking and acting like this, so I'm pretty certain it happens in the US. We must have copied from somewhere! I'm also sure that East LA could never look as potentially glamorous as this BUT, this was written by a young girl of 16 and at the very least this is fantasy. And why would this fantasy persist? Why might poor little rich girls want to risk all for a potentially exciting bout of carnal pleasure? Why indeed BUT, surely we have seen this theme explored a thousand times and always we exclaim that a woman could not be so foolish, that she would surely stay with her own kind. Oh yeah? Anyway it happens and it is depicted here with great candour and skill. A very grubby and absorbing morality tale of what happens when a couple of nubile white chicks stumble into an episode of 'The Wire'.

This movie was thrown out on DVD in 2005 without any real theatrical release. It's well pedigreed for such treatment, directed by famed documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County USA), written by late phenom Jessica Kaplan, "fixed" by famed screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and starring Anne Hathaway in her first serious role. The film is far from perfect, but it isn't nearly as bad as people have said. It's main problem is that it is undoubtedly exploitative. Hathaway and co-star Bijou Philips both get naked, the kind of naked that leaves the viewer feeling sleazy. The film is about a group of teenagers from upscale Los Angeles who like to play gangsta, pretending they're black or Latino. When Hathaway's boyfriend is threatened by a Latino drug dealer (Freddy Rodriguez of Planet Terror), she is attracted to the more authentic gangsta scene. She becomes involved with Rodriguez, which leads to the titular havoc. While many of the characters are one-dimensional and uninteresting, Hathaway's is well written, and she turns in the best performance of her career up to that point. She's nearly as intriguing here as she would later be in Rachel Getting Married. Also appearing is my favorite young actor of today, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but he has a pretty weak role, so it's not worth watching just for him.

I don't think all these comments do the movie justice, I do not think it was horrible, and I think the acting was actually excellent, but overall this movie just made me uncomfortable. I think everyone who says Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anne Hathaway acted horribly, did not understand the characters at all, the reality is that their characters acted terribly, and so Gordon-Levitt and Hathaway's performances were actually amazing, in the fact that they could portray teenagers with such skewed ideas of reality. From a previous comment that I agree with: "Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Sam is the best example of this skewed image. To some, his performance may seem over the top, but this is how Sam truly feels as though gang members act." I don't think I would recommend this movie to the casual movie-goer, but I thought the acting was actually great, because it would be difficult to act as a character who tries to act like someone ridiculous.