Click Here For Our Interview with Orlando Bloom

Click Here For Our Interview with Zoe Saldana

Haven

Haven is a godawful movie, the kind of washed-up, trumped-up, crime-themed trash that Elmore Leonard could do better in his sleep. There is never a moment where the people involved seem to know what they're doing; even the beautiful Cayman Islands scenery is distorted by needless handheld camera shots and bad digital video.

Our setting is the aforementioned Islands, our narrative a pretense of two intersecting storylines. In the first we meet the shady lawyer Mr. Allen (Stephen Dillane) and his shady client Carl Ridley (Bill Paxton), who have done some very bad things involving drug money and must leave the US to escape the police. Ridley takes along his teenage daughter, Pippa (Agnes Bruckner), who gets bored easily, but on her first night in town, young Islander Fritz (Victor Rasuk) wanders into her room and asks her to a party. Fritz is a self-christened smooth operator, whose idea of a great pickup line is, "This is the song that you need to add to the soundtrack of your life, girl," and before long we find out that Fritz is in trouble with the local drug lords. Meanwhile, Pippa settles down at a pool to watch blonde girls snort cocaine.

The second story involves Shy, a winsome overgrown man-child who of course is played by Orlando Bloom. Shy becomes involved with high schooler Andrea (Zoe Saldana), and on the eve of her eighteenth birthday he sneaks into her room and deflowers her, much to her family's consternation. Andrea's brother, Hammer (Anthony Mackie), gets so mad that he goes looking for Shy with a vial of acid, and then six months later, after Andrea has become the neighborhood slut, Shy comes out of hiding to seek revenge.

Now, even though the thought of Orlando Bloom seeking vengeance is only slightly less comical than Freddie Prinze, Jr. doing the same (particularly when Bloom does it looking like the Phantom of the Opera), that's only the tip of the many problems with this movie. The atrocious camerawork has already been mentioned, but let us for a moment discuss the screenplay's heavy-handed symbolism that names a money-seeking family "Sterling," dares to bring in a boat christened "Destiny" at a crucial plot point and has a gangster seriously call himself "Richie Rich." We should also mention the "stylish" editing scheme that drains the movie both of suspense and coherence by showing crucial events in flashback several scenes after they've happened, leaving us feeling like we've missed huge chunks of the story. We should also mention the confusingly quick cuts, the generically snazzy music and Shy's ironic, disaffected voiceover that lends the enterprise a doomed aura.

My favorite mistake, however, is the movie's condescending tendency

to have subtitles flash across the screen whenever Cayman Islanders speak to each other in lightly-accented English; the film acts like the little girl in Airplane!, helpfully telling the stewardess that she speaks jive. The blame for this mess is to be placed on the shoulders of first-time writer-director Frank E. Flowers, a USC graduate and Cayman Islands native who on the basis of this movie should rename himself John E. Vegetable.

The actors all do what they can with the material, but nobody comes out looking good. Rasuk, who played a not-dissimilar role to much greater effect in the charming indie Raising Victor Vargas a few years ago, quickly gets on our nerves with a stream of bad patter. Bloom, who has locked himself into a career playing the third male lead in epics, comes off as dead vanilla driftwood in a part that needs more danger than he could possibly offer it; Haven was shot in 2004 and shelved until Bloom's star rose, but in his case he would have been better off had it been burned. Paxton, playing the film's main adult role, looks befuddled, embarrassed and confused. Saldana has a decent pout, but her part contradicts itself more times than can be counted, and nobody else registers "” or, when they do, they register for the worse.

Haven is a film that goes searching for sex, drugs and violence and halts the camera for a few seconds wherever it finds them; all the more odious for its attempts to capitalize on young people as its sensationalized subjects and aiming for youth as its target audience. Every person involved with the movie, from the producer down to the best boy, would be better off had it never been made. I don't advocate doing damage to a movie, but Haven should be cut up into stockings for the poor.

Movie Grade: F

Synopsis:

Haven takes place during the course of one weekend as two shady businessmen (Paxton and Byrne) flee to the Caymans to avoid federal prosecution. Their escape ignites a chain reaction that leads Bloom, a British native, to commit a crime that has enormous implications.