Film

Havoc (2005)

Director: Barbara Kopple

Movie review

From Time Out London

Wherein the young, rich offspring of the environs of California’s Pacific Palisades make with their ‘Yo! Dawg!’ rap lingo, fight in car parks with rougher Latino types, cruise east LA in their Mercedes snorting powders and fucking bare-arsed on the back seats – and that’s just the girls. As Allison, the teenage child of absentee achiever parents, Anne Hathaway shows she can throw a punch and is willing regularly to bare her breasts in the name of art. In search of kicks, Allison invites her more vulnerable and possibly lesbian mate Emily (a more convincing Bijou Phillips) to a late-night house party where their drink- and drug-fuelled sexual bravado gets them in well over their heads. All this is directed by Barbara Kopple – who made the lauded doc ‘Harlan County’ thirty years back – with a strangely conventional gloss, which highlights the basic vacuity of Stephen ‘Traffic’ Gaghan’s underpowered script. You’d at least expect a decent exploitation movie from this material.

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