Review: Haven

Bill Paxton plays a rich yank who has been caught up in some kind of money laundering stuff, and with the Feds closing in, he grabs his 18 year-old daughter Agnes Bruckner and heads  for the Cayman Islands. Meanwhile, natives Orlando Bloom (a shy, poor fisherman, nicknamed Shy because he saw his dad killed years ago and has become introspective or something) and Zoe Saldana are in love, but must hide their relationship from her proud father (Robert Wisdom) and her hot-headed brother (Anthony Mackie). The two stories intersect at a local party which Bruckner, Bloom, Saldana, and Mackie attend, and at which tragedy strikes which will change them all forever. Stephen Dillane is Paxton’s repugnant, sleazy British acquaintance.

 

Multi-story 2007 flick in the “Crash” (it’s from the same producers) or “Magnolia” tradition from writer-director Frank E. Flowers (apparently a Cayman Islands native, not that he seems to want to tell us a lot about the local culture) never really comes off, thanks to its confusing direction and editing (which tries to obscure things to make it all seem much more important and interesting than it really is), a rather tenuous link between the stories (that otherwise don’t really seem to go together), and an overall sense of pointlessness.

 

The cast is good, with Bloom coming off best. He has the most interesting of the story strands, he gives a genuinely persuasive performance. Overall though, this just doesn’t work. It’s a whole lot of pretentiousness for something rather bland, and which never really goes anywhere (unlike say, “Magnolia”). If they had’ve ditched the other story (sorry, Bill!), done away with the insistence on being vague, and just went ahead and told the Bloom-Saldana story in straight forward fashion, the film might’ve been a lot better. But they didn’t, and it isn’t.

 

Rating: C