Havoc (2005)

image courtesy of eyeforfilm.co.uk

It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite movie. All most people remember about it is the “seeing the world without you in it” alternate reality, though that’s barely any of the film. The real power of the film is the trajectory of George Bailey’s life and how all the pieces lead to the inciting incidents that make Clarence’s arrival so important. As I stumble through Anne Hathaway’s filmography, this film feels like the start of a different career she could’ve had if she chose projects closer to this. Because this movie is very stupid.

Eric (Matt O’Leary), a teenage filmmaker, sets out to document the “wannabe” lifestyle of rich Pacific Palisades kids Allison (Anne Hathaway), her boyfriend Toby (Mike Vogel), and their crew, but the story quickly outgrows his camera: after Toby gets humiliated buying weed from a dealer named Hector (Freddy Rodriguez), Allison becomes drawn into Hector’s world, eventually bringing her friend Emily (Bijou Phillips) along to try to join his gang through a dice-roll “initiation” that turns into a gang rape when Emily is assaulted by multiple members. Allison refuses to go through with it and gets thrown out, Emily reports the assault to police, and the fallout spirals - Toby’s gang arms up for revenge, Hector’s crew hunts for Allison and Emily, and Allison scrambles to stop the violence and repair things with Emily - until the two gangs finally cross paths on the road home, ending in gunfire as the screen cuts to black.

This wants so badly to be a searing indictment of suburban privilege and poverty tourism, but it can’t decide what it’s actually saying, and that confusion sinks the whole thing. The wealth disparity angle is all surface: rich white kids “go slumming,” bad things happen, roll credits. There’s no real interrogation of why any of this is happening, what these kids get out of it, or what the film thinks we should take away beyond “poverty tourism bad.” It gestures at critique without doing the work to earn one.

Allison is the clearest symptom of that confusion. The movie seems to want her as its moral center - the one person who “gets it,” who tries to stop the violence, who owns up to her part and reconciles with Emily - while simultaneously painting her as a user who treats an entire neighborhood and its people like a costume she can put on and take off whenever she’s bored. You can build a genuinely interesting character out of that contradiction, but it takes real craft, and this film just kind of shrugs and lets both readings sit there unresolved, as if ambiguity alone counts as depth.

And then there’s Hector’s crew, who are almost entirely written in shorthand - the menacing Latino dealer, his interchangeable friends, all defined by threat and little else. It’s the kind of lazy stereotyping that undercuts any claim the film has to being a serious commentary on class and race, because it never bothers to make these characters people first. Compare that to how much interior life Allison and Toby’s gang get, however thin, and the imbalance says a lot about whose perspective the film actually cares about. Combined with the cardboard-cutout rich kids - the poser boyfriend, the hysterical best friend - you end up with a cast where almost nobody feels like more than a function of the plot.

But, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is genuinely unhinged as Toby. It’s not good. It’s terrible. The whole thing is like Malibu’s Most Wanted, but he’s the only one who commits so hard to the toxic bravado that he almost single-handedly makes scenes work that have no business working. Doesn’t make it good, but it’s kind of fun, in a terrible sort of way.

2 out of 5 Stars