Movie review: 'Haven'

Updated: September 21, 2006 - 6:06 PM

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Many of the characters in "Haven" squander their time drugged to the gills, and so, in a way, does this mind-numbing film. Its attention is unfocused, it's not motivated to achieve the most basic standards of storytelling and it is so wrong-headedly intoxicated with itself that it virtually staggers.

A scattershot story of low life and high finance in the money-laundering mecca of the Cayman Islands, it follows the intersecting paths of a dozen innocents and shady operators. The film stars Orlando Bloom as a romantic beach bum infatuated with the daughter of a wealthy black power broker and Bill Paxton as a Miami businessman with satchels full of cash, a lissome teenage daughter, and the FBI on his tail. The goal seems to have been to create a multilayered thriller, but the senseless, verbose and convoluted saga never generates simple suspense, let alone tension.

COLIN COVERT