It’s hard to believe that Havoc didn’t generate more inquisition or outrage during its initial release.  It’s one of the most racially condescending films I’ve ever seen.  Havoc is the modern equivalent of Shirley Temple learning valuable lessons from her shucking and jiving servants.  Who would have thought THEY could teach US?  

Havoc follows the gapingly empty lives of rich, L.A. white kids who build their identities around a parody of hip-hop culture:  slang-drenched vernacular, rap video clothing, and a propensity for senseless displays of aggression and violence.  Their lives take a turn for the worse once they decide to cruise across the tracks to the “bad” part of town in search of slumming “realness.”  But at least one of the girls, Allison (Anne Hathaway), finds the illicit and violent drug culture to be sexually titillating and decides to start hanging out with the same drug dealer who put a gun to her boyfriend’s head.  At first, you think that this will be yet another Romeo and Juliet regurgitation, but this movie aims much lower than cliché, instead leading into one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Drug dealer Hector (Freddy Rodriguez) doesn’t want a relationship with Allison, he really just wants her to roll the dice to figure out how many of his friends get to gangbang her and her “I’m so drunk” friend.  Allison ends up opting out, but her friend goes forward only to have to scream her way out once the pile-on begins.  She accuses them of raping her, though the movie implies that she’s lying despite a few moments that most viewers would readily identify as rape.  That’s the major problem with Havoc — the fact that it flows like it’s written by the immature, inane, and carnivorously vacuous main characters.  Though Havoc clearly wants to indict these white teens for skimming a minority culture without developing a nuanced view of the people they’re shoplifting from, it really ends up being more often than not passive-aggressively racist.

The drug-dealing Latino gang has absolutely nothing redeeming in their lives which include hotel rooms stuffed to the brim with their babies’ mommas, gang bangs as entertainment, and one scene in which they oafishly try to cruise through the rich neighborhood looking to beat the hell out of the girl pressing charges for rape, only to be stopped by the racially profiling police.  Given the film’s portrayal of minorities as sociopaths on the fringe of culture, tempting pretty white girls who soon learn better, it’s impossible to draw any conclusion other than the fact that this “hip-hop culture” thing, whatever it is, is unambiguously bad for the white children of promise, who will be torn from their potential by a culture of unremitting pathology.  Sadly, I don’t think this is what director Barbara Kopple intended, but her fumbling after-school-special dialogue and Crayola character scribbles take complicated interactions and commit cookie-cutter massacres of them.  

Terry Sawyer