Movie Review – Haven (2004)

I rented this DVD because it said on the back that it was made by the “same team” that brought us Crash. Since Crash has been one of my all-time favorites, I thought they would treat me with the same level of intelligence and excellence, no!

This is basically a 115 minute hip-hop music video with almost a “guest appearance” from Bill Paxton. If Haven were an entry in a camera techniques contest, she could have won a “Gold Hand Camera” award. But thousands of clever close-ups, a breathless edit, and a beautiful island that a movie doesn’t make.

The story is incredibly simple and hackneyed. Two scammers (in Florida?) Evade the feds and jump to the Cayman Islands. Bill Paxton is one of the baddies who takes his teenage daughter and an obscene amount of money wrapped around her body to the island.

At that point the plot breaks and we are introduced to an entirely new set of characters consisting of a poor fisher boy, a beautiful black girl (bearing a strong resemblance to Thandie Newton from Crash) who comes from an upper class family and her jealous brother who would stop at nothing to stop his sister’s affair with the working-class boy from the wrong side of the navy.

This “Caribbean Romeo and Juliet” theme is smothered under layer after layer of drugs, alcohol, endless parties around swimming pools where anything goes, lots of curses and curses and posturing by an army of bling-bling gang members with too much testosterone for their own good … going round and round in endless wash cycles.

And what about the character of Bill Saxton and his daughter? I think at some point you find yourself on the receiving end of a gun and agree to part with your money.

And something bad happens to the boy Romeo who loves the girl Juliet, but in the end both main characters have a Socratic conversion and repudiate all drugs and violence.

So we stand there spinning in the gentle trade winds with no closure in sight, but the music is still playing in the background if that’s any consolation.

I have a feeling that long after the most discerning moviegoers got up in the middle of this Crash impersonator and went home, Haven’s crew was still partying in the Cayman Islands.