 | |
List Price: $12.98 | | Label: New Line Home Video
Salesrank: 2475
Released: November 29, 2005 |
| Our Price: $5.87 |
| Used Price: $4.00 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
A group of wealthy Los Angeles teenagers try to become part of the "gangsta" lifestyle but soon run into trouble when they come face to face with a real gang of Latino drug dealers.Running Time: 92 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 794043843228
Description of Havoc (Unrated Version):
After making her name in The Princess Diaries, Anne Hathaway takes a radical detour with this edgy independent drama. As Allie, a wealthy gangsta wannabe, she makes no excuses for her delinquent behavior: "We're just teenagers and we're bored." When her Pacific Palisades posse, including pal Emily (Bully's Bijou Phillips), starts hanging out with a Latino gang (including Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodríguez), they learn what thug life is really about. Hathaway couldn't be more game: She swears, she fights--she disrobes (several times). Written and directed by Oscar winners Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and Barbara Kopple (American Dream), Havoc plays like a B movie, in the vein of the superior crazy/beautiful, and was released straight to video. For Hathaway fans, it's a chance to see this young talent in a very different light, but for Gaghan and Kopple followers, this lurid morality tale is sure to come as a letdown. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Havoc (Unrated Version) Reviews:
Anne Hathaway... as a wigger? 
2008-07-01 - I must admit, that alone drew me to Havoc, a tale about a young wigger girl named Allison who denies her rich, suburbian L.A. settings for the hard and gritty "thug" life of East L.A. Honestly, I didn't even know Hathaway would be topless in it (three times, as a matter of fact.) And honestly, I really could care less about that as she's not exactly Jessica Alba material, anyways. Moving on.
Hathaway, the tall, Owl-looking darling girl we know from about a dozen or so Princess roles plays wigger Alli(son), who hangs out with her equally phony friends and embrace the hardcore hip hop "thug" lifestyle because, as she put it, "we're teenagers and we're BORED." However, as a documentary-filming fellow high school student films the Life and Times of Whiteys Being Black (fake title), we get a little exposure to the "real" Allison, a straight-A student facing an identity crisis and wanting to live a "real, less-than-privledged" life. The same goes for her sister-like best friend Emily, played by Bijou Phillips. And just to note, considering that it's Anne Hathaway we're dealing with, Allison comes off as not-that-bad for a gangsta wanna-be. She can throw down in a fight, knows all the lyrics to Tupac's "How Do U Want It?", and all things considered, is pretty sexy as a white girl gangsta wannabe. At least more so than the real little teenage white girls trying to do the same thing and failing miserably.
One night, Alli and her poser boyfriends decide to ditch their suburbian hood and head straight out to the "real hood," East L.A. After Alli's boyfriend gets a cold, hard dose of reality via a gun barrel, Alli decides to ditch her loser wanna-be hard boyfriend for a real thug, Hector, played by Freddy Rodríguez. Hector, enticed by a tall, rich, white girl with a crush on him, decides to amuse Alli and Emily in his world that he lives in. He deals drugs and carries a strap, but that's the life he was given and it's not some joke meant for girls like Alli to exploit. But nonetheless, after Alli gets arrested with Hector and enjoys the "thrill" of being locked up, she and Emily become so engaged by the "thug" mentality that they decide they wanna join the 16th Street Gang.
And here's the part when Hathaway goes topless (again). In order for any females to join (well, I'm guessing attractive females), they have to roll a die. Whichever number between one and six they get is how many guys they have to participate in a gang bang. Alli is up for it, as she gets a one, and Emily (after drinking WAY too much) gets a three. Somewhere between getting naked and almost wrapping up though, Alli decides that this is wrong, but Emily, drunk and enthuastic, is in way too deep (literally). Alli bales Emily out at the last moment, and being the nicer-than-real-life guys that they are, Hector and his buddies let the white teens go.
Later on, Emily files a false rape charge against Hector's crew, which is just the excuse cops need to put away Hector for some serious time. And although Hector didn't rape Emily, he did almost (or full-on) have sex with a minor, which is at least a statutory rape charge. Naturally, word gets around and Hector's crew put a hit out on Alli and Emily in revenge. At the same time, the wanna-bes decide to take revenge on Hector for caressing Alli by loading up on some real guns and going "extra-hard" in a revenge shoot-out against the 16th Street Gang. All of reality comes crashing down on Alli and she's now stuck waist deep between what she almost agreed to do that night, what Emily DID do and what she's lying about, what Hector's boys are planning to do now, and what extremes the Pacific Palisades boys plan on doing with those guns.
Now, the movie itself does almost start off in a bit of a... unintentional parody of itself, in the beginning. The film opens with a hardcore rap song (that's not that bad) and has Allison, the fighting, hardcore-sex-having, rapping, tough-as-nails white girl from a privledged life being as hard and intimidating as a girl from that kind of life could possibly pull off. However, as the movie progresses along, a lot of the "funny" life of Pacific Palisades goes away in favor of the hard, gritty reality of East L.A. life. Hector, for a gun-wielding drug dealer, is actually not that bad of a guy, at all. And I like that, as it brings some realism to his character. Just because this is the life he has to live doesn't make him a bad guy. In reality, more than likely, Alli and Emily would've been severely raped. But Hector, as much as he does want to have sex with a tall, buxom white girl, also in many ways, likes the idea of having a friend from a world outside of his own. Allison's transformation from unintentional comical wigger girl to having learned her lesson comes kind of quick, and a few loose ends in the movie really aren't wrapped up, like the fate of Hector, for example. One big deal that kind of hurts the movie is the fact that Alli and Emily get to get away. I think the idea of actually having their characters BE raped would've brought home the seriousness and dangerousness the movie is trying to portray. The fact that they "almost" had something horrible happen to them definitely may not come across as strong to most people.
But the movie, in some form or another, kind of does serve as a cautionary tale to any of real-life suburbian white girl who wants to be a hardcore, hip-hop thugette like Alli. There are more than a few ways they could easily destroy their lives trying to chase after an identity that clearly isn't them. Sure the movie isn't perfect on many levels, but I think it's moral holds up, through it all.
Again, the idea of Anne Hathaway playing this role is just a bit odd, though. Someone like Julia Styles or Mandy Moore would give this character SOME credit, not the Princess Diaries girl, but for what it's worth, Hathaway does seem to take her role VERY seriously, in trying to break out of her typecast of being the "princess" girl. All in all, "Havoc" is a good movie. Not great, but it delivers on everything it's trying to do. Wigger girl tries to get into the real world of the steets, wigger girl nearly pays the price, wigger girl no longer wants to be wigger girl.
Someone shoulda busteed a cap in all of 'em! 
2008-03-29 - So, in this movie, Anne Hathaway tries to show us she has "range" by showing us her um, assets (I tried to use another word, but Amazon wouldn't accept my review). Great. Congratulations sweetie, you're a serious actress now.
Nothing in this movie is real. If people actually behaved the way the kids in this movie did in real life, they would wind up dead in a ditch. Freddy Rodríguez plays a gangster with a heart of gold who puts up with the shenanigans of a bunch of bored, spoiled wealthy teenagers. I would have put a cap in all of their faces early on and been done with it. Insipid waste of time.
Good!
2008-01-13 - About young generation dealing with life. Also, Bijou Philips and Anne Hathaway nude, can't beat that. lol
Lacks... almost everything, really.
2007-09-17 - Havoc (Barbara Kopple, 2005)
Havoc, oddly, finds itself in the unenviable position of being a character-driven movie whose characters are not strong enough to survive without a plot. The end result, as one might expect, is sometimes intriguing, but that's not enough to battle the boredom of the rest of the movie's running time.
There isn't much of a plot, as it's a character-driven movie, but what there is is that a bunch of gangsta wannabes get mixed up with a real East LA drug dealer. This begs the question: if gangsta wannabes are deeply annoying in real life, why would anyone want to watch an hour-and-a-half movie about them? Even the prodigious acting talent of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the toplessness of Anne Hathaway can't save this, perhaps because neither (the only two interesting things about the movie) get nearly enough screen time. Levitt, at least, seems to be having some fun with his character, while all the other white males come off as Eminem wannabes, the Hispanics in the movie are all walking stereotypes, and the women are there to provide supporting material-- even though two of them (Hathaway and Bijou Phillips) are in the lead roles.
I'm not sure why I haven't learned yet; I haven't liked a Stephen Gaghan screenplay since Rules of Engagement seven years ago. Maybe this will finally be enough to convince me he's the screenwriting equivalent of post-1990 Joel Schumacher. *
Accurate but for one fatal flaw 
2007-09-17 - This film would like you to think the hip hop, ghetto gang bangers young teenagers are enticed by are beaners. I think most people are going to see through this and laugh their way into turning this DVD into a Frisbee. Having lived in the Hispanic ghetto for seven years, I can tell you white girls do not flock to either the Filipino or Hispanic parties. I think, by process of elimination, you can do the math and figure out which ethnicity I'm talking about. Hint: It's not the Caucasian gangs, either. Another hint: It's the ethnicity that 99% of rap and hip hop artists are. Not that gangs of this ethnicity are any worse, but they are the ones that get this kind of attention. Clearly this minor (sarcastically rolls eyes) fact was altered to be more politically correct. Personally, I think the hip hop culture needs a swift kick in the bollocks. If done accurately, it would have been a bunch of 11 to 16 year old cute suburban white girls smoking pot and being gang raped (statutory or otherwise) by a bunch of...well, you know where I'm going with this. Before you call me a racist, remember I lived it and you did not, and your emotional response to what I'm saying is the same reason the film makers were compelled to take the "less offensive" route and probably change the original script. Apparently they don't think Mexicans feel offense, I guess. Furthermore, the idea that any kind of genuine romance actually blossoms out of this rotten scene is clearly more Hollywood marketing fluff, as is the happy ending. Reality is far more insane and extreme than this film achieves, but you get a taste for the general behavior, at least. Lastly, I feel sorry for Bijou Phillips constantly being exploited like this. Hopefully she has more talent than this and her career can develop beyond this typecasting.
