Customer Reviews

Havoc (Unrated Version)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

Obviously the main draw of this DVD is the fact that Anne Hathaway appears 'nude'. However, if your expecting all out full-frontal nudity and borderline porno scenes with Hathaway---think again. Several scenes (most notably the one with Hathaway and Philips in the bedroom) had oh so much potential, but in the end there are simply a few scenes of Hathaway topless. (a lot more of Philips)

Now, on to the movie...

This is an interesting topic to make a film about...wiggers AKA white kids with too much time and money. Ironically the term is mostly used by white people to label other white people. Anyways, THIS particular film did not achieve anything spectacular. The story begins with 2 'crews' arguing with each other and introduces us to the PTC (Hathaway's crew). The story itself is not very interesting (white kids go to the hood and get involved with a gang), but, surprisingly, the film is entertaining to watch.

The character's themselves (in the beginning) were a little to close to 'Malibu's Most Wanted' to fully embrace this movie as a drama and care about them. Also, as the story progresses, not enough effort is put into learning about or developing the characters. (More details about Hathaway's character in the beginning would have been great)This is unfortunate becuase later in the film, it would have been helpful to care a little more about these people. The characters really only start to become more than two dimensional in the last 25 minutes or so. Anne Hathaway and Bijou Philips were good on screen together and had the most authentic feeling relationship in the entire movie.

Overall, this film definitely had potential to be a good film and could have been done wonders with a few more plot intricacies and more character development. But, as is, I would RENT this movie instead of purchasing it.

When I saw "Brokeback Mountain" I thought that was the film in which Anne Hathaway made it clear she was not going to be doing any more princess movies for Disney by dong a nude scene. But then I discovered that after making her second princess movie and then doing vocal work for "Hoodwinked," Hathaway made "Havoc" and went from PG to R without a transitional PG-13 movie (okay, unrated in terms of the DVD, but R in the theater). I heard that Mandy Moore was originally cast as the lead for this film and I have to wonder if she bailed given what the role required or if they changed the script to give it this "harder" edge that it has now. Putting in deleted scenes to justify labeling it as unrated might increase the word of mouth about the film, but it did not improve it in any way that will impress anybody with a more than prurient interest in the festivities.

Hathaway plays Allison Lang, a bored high school student who lives in an affluent part of Los Angeles. Along with her boy friend, Toby (Mike Vogel), best friend, Emily (Bijou Phillips), and everybody else in her group, Allison talks and dresses like bone fida members of the gangster culture from the music they listen to. They strike us as being pretty sad and pathetic, a judgment that is amply underscored when Toby tries to score some crack cocaine in East L.A. and is brought all the way down to the ground by Hector (Freddie Rodriguez, who does a much better job of getting beyond his role on "Six Feet Under" to impress viewers). If not for Allison's intervention Toby and everybody else in their car might have ended up dead. After this encounter Toby retreats into bravado, while Allison, having seen the real thing, responds to the danger. She drags Em along for the fun, and keeps pushing things with Hector and his gang until they come to a head.

The story here can be traced back to a spec script called "Powers That Be" that Jessica Kaplan sold in 1995 when she was still a teenager. Kaplan, who based the screenplay on her experiences in high school were her white friends were caught up in imitating gangster culture, died in the crash of a small plane in Los Angeles in 2003 (the film is dedicated to her). Stephen Gaghan revised the story and finished the screenplay, so he ends up being responsible for what we have seen. The idea of telling a story about these characters is certainly worth pursuing. I can remember chaperoning a prom and watching a bunch of white girls standing together on the dance floor singing along to rap songs and thinking that it would be hard for them to be removed much farther from the culture they were imitating.

The flaw with "Havoc" is rather interesting. It constructs a situation so that when Allison and Em agree to be initiated into Hector's gang that you know this is going to get bad. What follows makes it clear things are going to go so far beyond bad that you have to face down an impulse to stop the movie before you get to the really bad part. But then "Havoc" backs off and after an initial sense of relief you realize this is a movie that was made with the safety on, which puts us in the "no guts, no glory" territory. Ironically, what derails the movie is a scene that shows the best part of what is going on is the relationship between Allison and Em, even though it does not always seem like this is a good thing. Ultimately the only sympathetic character is Eric (Matt O'Leary), whose omnipresent camcorder distances him from the rest of the group, but who is able to make a pointed remark that surprisingly hits home for Allison.

Those who check out this film because of Hathaway's nude scenes will find something similar in the scene where she is being filmed by Eric where things get rather interesting and then the off switch is hit. Basically, that is what this movie does. It plays a game of chicken with cold harsh reality and then it yanks the wheel hard and quick so it can paste together a "happy" ending before the credits role. I can appreciate Hathaway's reasons for taking this job, but her character of Allison ends up proves to be guilty of slumming, and not even first-rate slumming at that. That makes the nudity and profanity somewhat gratuitous, all things considered.

The test screenings for this movie went so badly that it was sent straight to DVD. Apparently the test audiences just couldn't see the fun in watching a really, really bad movie. What's up with that?

Its true absurdity is revealed about two scenes in: at a raucous, drugged-out high school party, Anne Hathaway silences the crowd by seductively beckoning her wigger boyfriend and crooning, "How do you want it? How do you feel? Growing up as a nigga in a cash game, living in the fast lane, I'm for real."

Your jaw will drop open and remain there for the entirety of the film. But meanwhile in the world of "Havoc", Hathaway's peers (including a cracked-out Joseph Gordon Leavitt) react with admiration and awe. Minutes later, the erstwhile Princess is taking off her shirt (unnecessarily) before going down on the aforementioned mack daddy. And even this nudity seems organic to the narrative when contrasted with a later scene where she masturbates while being videotaped - an episode that truly strains all credibility.

The script to this movie is so absurd, it makes you question whether Stephen Gaghan really "gets it" at all. Allison, ostensibly the rebellious but intelligent heroine, merely comes off as an anti-intellectual, spoiled slut. Not helping matters is a subplot involving a disaffected documentarian that adds absolutely nothing to the action, unless its intent is to make us hate the film's protagonist. Nevertheless, the odd bit of nudity and the outright hilarious pronouncements by members of the "PLC" (the Palisades High School gangbanger club) always keep the laughter coming.

The supporting players do a lot to lighten the mood. Bijou Phillips, as best friend Emily, turns in a priceless scene where she agrees to a sexual intiation that (big shock) goes too far! When Hathaway gets in trouble, all of a sudden the guy from the first Terminator and Laura San Giacomo show up as concerned parents. JGL has a scenery-chewing moment where he screams, "That is my queen! I would kill for that woman!" in reference to snaggletoothed Bijou. And Freddy Rodriguez, who really should have known better, is paired with Hathaway in what one assumes is supposed to be romance. All-around, this movie is so lame, it's a classic. You just have to see it.

I read` a lot of negative reviews here which I personally think are way too judgmental. I just viewed the movie and I think its much deeper than people give it credit for. The story has been told before.. I grant you that, but still the acting and the emotions are believable. Rich kids looking for a "real" experience so they get hooked up with gangsters and their troubles.

Anne Hathaway gives a good performance as a smart ass kid who wants to get away from her boring life into the unknowns of downtown LA. She kooks up with a group of gangsters known as the 16th street gang. He interactions gives her more of a learning experience than she wanted. Throughout the process she is somewhat composed, but still frazzle when things go wrong.

At the end things go horribly wrong and hard lessons are learned. The whole nude thing is way overrated. Its not THAT shocking. The story and the way its played out is satisfying enough.

After desperately searching the net for any sign of the film Havoc, it looks like most of us guys finally have a DVD to truly celebrate. Havoc stars an Anne Hathaway rocking the full monty and playing with, well, something nice. The film is supposedly about "an edgy look at a group of rich teens who, so bored with their privileged existences, adopt an urban street lifestyle", but most can only hear "Anne Hathaway naked." And why not?

Every male moviebuff on the net, pervs included, have at one time or another searched the phrase 'havoc naked' or 'anne hathaway naked'. Not that this is a bad thing, considering what this girl was willing to do for this film.

In a report released by New Line Cinema, reposted by Joblo, they had these important facts to say about the upcoming Havoc DVD.

* New Line Cinema is bypassing theatres and is instead going straight to DVD.
* Havoc will come in two formats. An R-rated version that is 86 minutes and an "unrated" version that is 94 minutes.

It was first reported that all the 'hardcore' nakedness was going to be cut before any DVD release of Havoc. However, now that we have an "unrated" version, we may be able to see Anne Hathaway in all her glory. But what this means is that I can put on my geek cap on November 18th for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and then quickly rotate that back into my pervert cap. Ahh, sweet bliss in November.

As most of you already know, this film does show Anne Hathaway topless. But so does a much more brilliant film Brokeback Mountain when she is having sex with Jack in the station wagon, asking his "Am I going too fast?" This movies plays like a sad violin. The storyline is simple: rich teenagers feel like they are unwanted so they act "black" and have sex a lot. Anne Hathaway is such a good actress, portraying Allison, a stressed out teen who wants to be someone else, or in her words she is "Sick of this phony life." Bijou Phillips plays Allison's best friend, Emily, who (SPOILER ALERT!!!---gets raped by two Mexican gansters.) The film is a dazzling display of affection for what many people want to do, pretend to be someone else. Allison wants to change her lifestyle, so she gets involved with a Mexican ganster, who deals drugs. Barbara Kopple makes this film a complete aray of brilliance. It is slow at parts, and the ending makes you think of what really happened.
The film progresses and makes a big band at the end---literally. The rest of the cast includes Spy Kid's Matt O'Leary, 10 Things I Hate About YOu's Goseph Gordon-Levitt, and TV's Drake and Josh's Josh Peck. The film was released straight to DVD because the studio did not know how to release it, and for obvious reasons, I agree with them. The reason I am only giving it four stars and not five is because it is slow at parts and the ending leaves you hanging.

Anne Hathaway (Princess Diaries, Brokeback Mountain) plays Allison, a girl who with her friends are all apart of this click who loves black music, they also talk like it too. Well, one night, they go downtown in the East side looking for some stuff to buy but one of them ends up getting roughed up by some Mexican guy, played by Freddy Rodriguez (Dead Presidents, Cant Hardly Wait). Soon, Hathaway goes back and starts to hang out with his crowd, he brings her girls along with her. She even gets arrested and this doesnt please her parents, played by Michael Biehn (Cherry Falls, The Terminator) and Laura San Giacomo (Just Shoot Me, Sex Lies & Videotape). She doesnt even have a good relationship with them at all. Later on, Hathaway and her friend played by Bijou Phillips (Bully, Black & White) want in on the gang and the initiation would be whoever rolls the amount of numbers on a dice, that many dudes you gotta do. Then later on it becomes more dramatic and yada-yada. Scripted by none other then Stephen Gaghan who directed one of 2005's best movies last year Syriana..sorry Gaghan, this movie isnt that spectacular. There's a lot of corny acting, especially when those white boys try to act black....Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock From The Sun, Brick) being one of them. Plus, who hasnt seen this already? Felt like Black & White mixed with Bully without the violent killing of a friend mixed with some other stuff. Yes, Anne Hathaway is nude, she doesnt look half bad bad which will drive in any male viewers to see, yes that includes me. Also starring Shiri Appleby (Undertow, Roswell), Alexis Dziena (Broken Flowers, Wonderland), Mike Vogel (Texas Chainsaw Masscara remake, Wuthering Heights remake), Matt O'Leary (Frailty, Brick), Channing Tatum (Coach Carter, Supercross), Josh Peck (Mean Creek, Snow Day) and of course Raymond Cruz (Collateral Damage, Training Day) as to be in it.

Good thing I got this movie for $2.00 at a pawn shop, because it was awful. It tried to shed light on why rich kids love hip-hop and urban culture, but it failed. Anne Hathaway is a good actress, but even she can't save this movie. Unless you have a free movie rental coupon don't waste your money. Lucky for me the pawn shop gave me a refund.

The studios plan was to release this movie earlier this year, but plans got scraped. The movie had a great premise of rich teenagers wanting to be someone else. Anne Hathaway's character, Allison, is a latch-key girl who has parents in a rocky marriage, and she justs wants to get out of her boredom. But her journey into East LA is the cause of her boyfriend looking for drugs. These teenagers suffer from low self esteem and hide it through drugs, sex, and acting like hiphop stars. The movie set up the characters, but unfortunately ironically loses itself once the girls return to East LA. The plot becomes simplified as the girls try to join the gang and end up with more than they want.

Anne Hathaway does show depth in her character who is pretending to be something she's not. Everybody is also talking about her nude scenes, but I'm sorry, but the scenes do become hard to watch and you see these girls fall.

The studios wanted something more with this movie and so did I. The disc does come with a supposed trailer makes the movie a cross between Traffic and KIDS, but fails.

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.