Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Brilliant and touching

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

as a fan of Disney films,animated and live action or films along those lines,these type of films barely get a look in from me.the only reason these indie sort of films ever get a look in is because i buy all dvds/blurays of actors/actresses i like,in this case its obviously Anne Hathaway.of course this is a huge leap from playing a innocent little princess but i think this is the only reason so many people have given this a negative review.i would say if you want a bad Anne Hathaway movie then watch passengers.havoc is easily her best film to date,as good as princess diaries was,there is similar films out there and while ill always buy them all and enjoy them all its nice to see something different once in a while and this is as different as it gets.the nudity is not just added for the sake of it,instead it is a story in itself and the only downside was how it ended,its far too short for the amount of story there was to tell.every single one of the main characters had at least one or 2 more story points to finish on,it seemed like it was just getting into the film and it ended but it shows how good a film it was if the only bad side is that it leaves viewers wanting more.there easily could have been a sequel and the first time i watched this the very first thing i did was go online to see if a sequel was coming because i really wanted to know what happened to Alison and if she made friends with her friend who was raped,and the main bit missing is who was killed at the end,i don't understand the point of finishing a film with audio only so you cant see the main part of the film,the whole story led up to a gang fight and that very fight was just a blank screen and a random gun shot then credits roll.but overall its a great movie and worth watching if only to see Anne Hathaway in yet another brilliant film and up there with the high budget blockbusters

I bought this on DVD very cheaply, almost exclusively because I thought the title was great. Checking the film out on IMDb upon my return home and I wondered if I would ever watch it. So many reviewers tell of the irritating way the male rich kids are always aping the gangster classes and the girls talking in that affected cluck-cluck way. The fact hip-hop does little for me looked like I was set for some fast forwarding. How wrong I was. This is one heck of a good movie. OK, I don't suppose every little rich boy is quite as silly as those depicted and same goes for the girls, BUT there is more than an element of truth here. Even as an oldie living in the UK, I am aware of kids speaking and acting like this, so I'm pretty certain it happens in the US. We must have copied from somewhere! I'm also sure that East LA could never look as potentially glamorous as this BUT, this was written by a young girl of 16 and at the very least this is fantasy. And why would this fantasy persist? Why might poor little rich girls want to risk all for a potentially exciting bout of carnal pleasure? Why indeed BUT, surely we have seen this theme explored a thousand times and always we exclaim that a woman could not be so foolish, that she would surely stay with her own kind. Oh yeah? Anyway it happens and it is depicted here with great candour and skill. A very grubby and absorbing morality tale of what happens when a couple of nubile white chicks stumble into an episode of 'The Wire'.

Despite the fact that this movie is like the umpteenth variation of Rebel Without A Cause, anybody who has gone to a high school in an affluent area in the last decade and seen the amount of pampered young 'wiggers' there are knows that the premise of this flick is relevant to today's youth and is worth exploring. Unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver on this promising premise and only succeeds in wasting a fine performance from Anne Hathaway.The movie WANTS to make a powerful statement about spoiled, naive, pseudo-disillusioned youths searching for identity in the superficial only to receive a colossal reality check when they realize the life they've been imitating isn't as glamorous as they had thought. Unfortunately, this noble message is lost in a weak script and characters that are either one-dimensional, unbelievable or both. Although one must consider the fact that the screenplay was for the most part written by a 16-year-old girl before judging it, it is disappointing that an Academy Award-winning co-writer with some experience with this genre of film (Stephen Gaghan) could not give the screenplay and characters a more authentic feel.Even if it was the screenwriter's intention to make the script's dialogue horrible for the sake of legitimizing just how inane the gang of rich white teens are acting, the horrid screen writing comes off so cartoonish that the viewer will have an extremely difficult time accepting the dialogue, and consequently the behavior, of these characters as being legitimate. As a result, the gang of rich white wannabe thugs come off, for the most part, as being overwrought caricatures saddled with some of the most laughably horrible dialogue ever heard in a motion picture. As for the gang of cholo thugs in the movie, they come off as being far too nice and too stereotypical to Latinos, and thus seem only marginally less cartoony that the gang of rich white kids.The movie's lone saving grace is Anne Hathaway. Playing a role that shares some parallels with and could be considered a natural extension of her smart-girl-with-a-rebellious-streak Meghan Green character from the short-lived TV series Get Real, hers was the only character in the movie that had any sort of depth and believability. The script, despite its many shortcomings, succeeds in making it clear just how self-aware, intelligent, and capable of good Hathaway's character is, in spite of her actions as a member of the gang of rich white teens, giving the film its lone three-dimensional character. Because of Hathaway's talent as an actress, as well as her successful exploitation of the public's predominant perception of her as a wholesome girl next door for this film, it is easy for the audience to believe that Hathaway's character is the rebel-without-a-clue fish out of water that the script is trying to portray her as. Hathaway's acting is superb, head and shoulders above anyone else in the film, which adds to her character's legitimacy. However, the people who see this movie will likely be too busy snickering at the inane lines of dialogue she's repeatedly forced to drop or, more likely, be gaping at their TV thinking "O...M...G! The chick from The Princess Diaries is actually TOPLESS!" to notice her solid performance.Which leads to a discussion of arguably the biggest reason most people even know this film exists. Hathaway has claimed in interviews that she only does nudity in films if she deems it necessary to the story. While a case can be made that most of the nudity in the film was appropriate when considering the context of the scenes in which it was featured, I find myself questioning just how "necessary" it is, for example, to show Hathaway's character popping her top while making out with her boyfriend (or for that matter, to see Bijou Phillips' character in the film topless while taking a bubble bath). That's not to say this movie should be mistaken for a late-night film on Skinemax; it most certainly isn't. But Hathaway is topless just enough in this film to make this obvious attempt to expand her acting repertoire beyond the roles in family films she had previously been limited to seem heavy-handed and maybe even a little desperate. Anne, take it from me, you're a wonderful actress. That alone will do more to land you mature roles than taking off your top for sex scenes in a poorly-scripted indie movie ever will.When all is said and done, the amount of nudity in this movie only made it worse; when you factor the amount of it in along with in how disappointing the movie is, it only adds evidence to the argument that the only reason this movie exists was for Hathaway to prove to us just how far she was willing to go to avoid being typecast as Princess Mia Thermopolis for the rest of her acting career...which is a shame, considering her legitimately solid acting job in this movie.Rent "Kids" or "Thirteen" instead; both films are about topics similar to this movie and both are far better.

I don't think all these comments do the movie justice, I do not think it was horrible, and I think the acting was actually excellent, but overall this movie just made me uncomfortable. I think everyone who says Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anne Hathaway acted horribly, did not understand the characters at all, the reality is that their characters acted terribly, and so Gordon-Levitt and Hathaway's performances were actually amazing, in the fact that they could portray teenagers with such skewed ideas of reality. From a previous comment that I agree with: "Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Sam is the best example of this skewed image. To some, his performance may seem over the top, but this is how Sam truly feels as though gang members act." I don't think I would recommend this movie to the casual movie-goer, but I thought the acting was actually great, because it would be difficult to act as a character who tries to act like someone ridiculous.