To be straight, this movie went straight to dvd and as a general rule, I don't usually like Stephen Gaghan's work. Barbara Kopple's direction - she directed Shut Up and SIng, the Dixie Chicks documentary and one of my favorite Oz episodes (the season three finale) - encouraged me to watch Havoc along with the promise of good YA characters. But these are YA characters on crack. Literally. And you don't get close enough to any of them in the first half of the movie to care the least about what is going to happen. With that being said, I saw this movie two nights ago and I can't stop thinking about the last forty five or so minutes of the film. And I think that says a lot about a movie.
Anne Hathaway's pretty good but you see more of her breasts here than in Brokeback Mountain. Bijou Philips is okay but there's not enough of it in the first part of the movie to justify her actions at the end. Freddy Rodriguez's Hector is on the opposite end of the spectrum as Freddy in Six Feet Under and so I found myself both intrigued and fascinated. Give this guy more work, Hollywood. He's fantastic.
People who are sensitive by sexual violence should not see this film. It's pretty graphic. The action is not as disturbing as how the characters get there and I imagined it could offend those who do not like to see such scenes on television. The most disturbing part, ironically, is exactly why I find the movie so fascinating and the only reason I'd recommend it.
So, four stars not because it's good. Because it's not. But because it was a story that I hadn't heard told in way that I wasn't expecting about characters I knew really well. And because I can't stop thinking about it.