Haven: Critic Reviews

A terminally muddled crime drama.

From a producer of Crash comes Haven, an even phonier exercise in manufactured conflict, facile irony and preposterous contrivance.

What Haven is selling is cultural vividness. Each detail feels right.

Despite Flowers's obvious ambition ... Haven rarely feels more than third-rate.

Like a mango rotting in the sun, Frank Flowers' squishy Caribbean thriller has been sitting on the shelf long enough to attract suspicion. Bite into it at your own risk.

Time will tell if Bloom can grow, but Haven suggests writer-director Flowers may become a perennial pleasure.

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique.

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.

While the events are engaging in a minimovie way, as a whole they make for one bungled flick.

Empty and moribund.

The debut from writer-director Frank E. Flowers tosses all the classic noir elements into the shaker but comes up with a taste that's excitingly pungent.

A long-shelved, watchable but mediocre Mobius strip of a thriller.

Orlando Bloom is the name star in Haven and also serves as executive producer, which must mean he thought making the film was a good idea.

The presence in the ensemble of Orlando Bloom, who also serves as a producer, could be an initial enticement, but his performance is one of the weakest in a mixed bag.

Haven has the makings of a decadent nighttime soap, but none of the components of a cohesive, satisfying film.

Although writer-director Frank E. Flowers, making his feature-film debut, falls into the common traps of MTV-Soderbergh progeny, busybody editing and camera action, he generates tension with relatively strong storytelling and compelling relationships.

Writer/director Frank E. Flowers loses track of his own narrative puzzle that includes a story about a shady but rich Floridian (Bill Paxton) with an 18-year-old daughter (Agnes Bruckner %u2013 "Blue Car") escaping to Grand Cayman from the feds who want t

What the film lacks in dramatic depth it makes up for in its visuals, which keep viewer attention even when the story drags.

The audience just has to work a little too hard to see through the bad editing to the Haven that lies beneath, no matter how interesting and promising that movie may be.

Flowers' manic style...leaves little room to consider what is actually going on beyond all the eye candy and sensory numbing.

By the time this quasi Robert Altman-like meeting of unrelated characters happens -- and even if the viewer has kept track of all the characters -- it's hard to care about much of anything, other than knowing the film is nearly over.