I rented this DVD because it said on the back that it was made by the “same team” that brought us Crash. Since Crash has been one of my all-time favorites, I thought I would be treated with the same level of intelligence and excellence, nope!

This is basically a 115-minute hip-hop music video with almost a “guest appearance” by Bill Paxton. If Haven had entered a camera skills contest, she might have won the “Golden Hand Camera” award. But thousands of clever close-ups, breathless editing, and a beautiful island don’t make a movie.

The story is mind-bogglingly simple and hackneyed. Two con artists (in Florida?) evade the feds and jump to the Cayman Islands. Bill Paxton is one of the bad guys who brings his teenage daughter and an obscene amount of cash wrapped around her body to the island.

At that point, the plot breaks and we are introduced to a whole new set of characters consisting of a poor fisherman boy, a beautiful black girl (bearing a strong resemblance to Thandie Newton from Crash) who comes from an upper class family and her jealous brother who would stop at nothing to stop his sister’s affair with the working class boy from the wrong side of the marina.

This “Caribbean Romeo and Juliet” theme is smothered under layer upon layer of drugs, booze, endless parties around anything-goes pools, lots of swearing, swearing and posturing by an army of flashy gangbangers with too much testosterone for their own good. … going round and round in endless wash cycles.

And what about the character of Bill Saxton and his daughter? I think at some point he finds himself on the receiving end of a gun and agrees to part with the money from him.

And something bad happens to the boy Romeo who loves the girl Juliet, but in the end both main characters have a Socratic conversion and deny all drugs and violence.

So we stand there twisting in the gentle trade winds with no closure in sight, but the music is still playing in the background if it’s any consolation.

I have a feeling that long after the most discerning moviegoers got up in the middle of this Crash impersonator and went home, the Haven crew was still partying at the Caymans.