When the film first opens, we are introduced to Bill Paxton's Carl Ridley, who is involved in some sort of vague money-laundering scam. When the feds get wind of it, he flees Miami with his daughter, Pippa (Agnes Bruckner), and a whole lot of $100 bills Saran-wrapped to his torso. Writer-director Frank E. Flowers (making his feature debut) then proceeds to drop this storyline for what seems like an hour to concentrate on the aforementioned doomed love affair. Rest assured, the two plotlines will eventually meet, but only tangentially.
At this point, you may be wondering what is going on. The publicity for Haven touts it as being "from the makers of Crash." This really just means that the two films have the same producer but share none of the creative forces.
What they do have in common is a large ensemble cast, a vast system of interwoven plot threads and enough racial tension to make the whole thing explode at the end. For better or for worse, Paul Haggis used the contrivances in his film to make a statement about the human condition. Those who complained his filmmaking was heavy-handed should see this movie, in which much of the action takes place on Friday the 13th and Bloom sails around in a boat named Destiny.
Flowers, a Cayman native, does have a distinct sense of local flavor, and for a while at least a couple of his characters and their stories manage to be engaging. Eventually, though, almost everyone turns out to be a drug user or dealer, a thug, a thief or a killer, and we get to watch all of them flushing their lives down the toilet. Throw in some flashy editing and it's a film where everything is connected yet disjointed at the same time. By the end, it's unclear what the whole thing is supposed to be about.