Haven (2004) Movie Review

From the moment fresh-faced director and writer Frank E. Flowers opens "Haven," it's a hazy picture, seeming all too disjointed and fractured in style and story. The manner in which the plot unfolds is unintelligible until you realize that there are several stories emptying into the same corner of the world, Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands, where they are free from taxation and imprisoned by everything else. This film makes Grand Cayman look like the Las Vegas meets Los Angeles of the Caribbean, where the suits co-exist with the gangsters, and it all looks like the same business. This should be paradise but no place is without sin and corruption, and no innocent can live there without it touching them too.

Orlando Bloom (the "Lord of the Rings" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogies) plays just such an innocent, so innocent that his character's name is Shy, but it wasn't a pleasant event that earned Shy the moniker he embraces. Agnes Bruckner ("Murder by Numbers" and the FOX series "24") plays Pippa, a semi-innocent who is more naive than pure and is the daughter of a dirty businessman (Bill Paxton, "Titanic" and "Frailty") who is about to be busted by the FBI for illegal financial dealings. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated plot thread, Shy is madly and truly in love with Andrea, played by Zoe Saldana ("The Terminal" and the first "Pirates of the Caribbean"). Andrea's father and brother Hammer (Anthony Mackie, "Half Nelson" and "Million Dollar Baby") both have severe and extreme reactions to her loss of virginity to the devoted young Shy. In addition to the principal cast, several smaller parts are filled with faces that can recognized from one place or another, many from popular television shows; Jake Weber ("Medium" and the "Dawn of the Dead" remake), Rachel Miner ("Medium" and the movie "Bully"), Sarah Carter ("Smallville"), and "Serena Scott Thomas ("Buffy").

There is an incredible amount of talent in this film, and all of it is put to excellent use. The performances create characters that are tightly wound and ready to snap having become victims of the snakes in their counterfeit Eden. Bloom's Shy and Saldana's Andrea are the most sympathetic and wonderfully wrought subjects of the entire movie, breathing such depth into them that they seem as tragic and star-crossed as any modern day Romeo and Juliet. Their love story is a broken one, and the ruin it falls to so quickly sets a series of events into motion that ties all the jigsaw pieces together. Unfortunately, it is difficult to follow this and have an interest in understanding it until half way into the movie. Shy is a main character and he does not enter the picture until a third of the way through the story. There are time lapses and flashes backward and forward with no warning or explanation save for the fact that the worst of the climax explodes on Friday the 13th. However, these gaps are filled in very well in the last third of the film and that is when the movie has its greatest moments. The scenes that filter together and run into one another tie up loose ends and make the chaos of all the exposition seem more appropriate given the chaos of the day.

Between Pippa being arrested, Andrea being punished for making love to the man of her dreams, Shy's male best friend attempting to finally make a move on him, and one huge pile of cash imported with Paxton's fugitive father, the gears finally come apart. And, the payoff for the first half of the movie is its second half. It is difficult to watch at times with the direction, but the writing certainly has merit. The timeline and its anti-chronological sequence of events, however, does not work its best at the movie's beginning. At the end, some literal and psychological scars are left, and the material is richer for having covered all the ground it can in a heaven that turns out to be a hell. The sad truth about "Haven" is that nowhere and nothing is ever safe.