My kind of woman. Imagine Tina Fey going into internal exile amid an Oceania of next generation Olsenites.

Now imagine me writhing like an electric fan to see Mrs. Shakespeare's namesake give a stunningly all-grown-up performance in a Stephen Gaghan-scripted disaster called Havoc. (Not as in what you cry before letting slip the dogs of war, although you may be tempted by the prospect of remote change.) It's about ghetto fabulous white teens from the Palisades who are already rich but are going to die trying to -- what, exactly is never firmly established. Keep their rep with the sucka MCs in charge of their annuities at Merrill Lynch? Drop Benjamins on the latest Gucci skin grafts?

The film is more or less Traffic on a learner's permit. Although, Hathaway has successfully zipped right into that hooker/housewife carpool lane as Allison, a smart but self-destructive (aren't they all?) poseur gangsta with domestic demons and wits and a lack of selfconsciousness ill-befitting someone with her sharp stare and perpetually elevated eyebrow. She decides that the elite West Coast club scene -- which includes scamming on dirty old men bearing blow -- has grown terribly old and blase ("We. Are. Totally. Fucking. Bored.") whereas all things vibrantly new and exciting reside in... East L.A.!

In a wrong plot and highway turn about as plausible as a drug czar's daughter becoming a tenement crackwhore, she and her girlfriends front to a Latino dealer (Freddy Rodriguez, six feet in over his head) with evidently more patience than client pages. Allison and Bijou Phillips (probably blissfully unaware that she was in fact filming a minor motion picture) want to be initiated into his gang, and the hazing ritual is about what you'd expect it to be. Their spot of Lifetime "Movie of the Week" trouble culminates in an unconvincing shouting session from Allison's father (Michael Biehn, finally showing his age), and serene intercession by her mother (a fugual Laura San Giacomo) as a bromide-spouting and Percoset-popping Martha Stewart.

Perhaps now would be the time to mention that Allison intermittently deconstructs her and her friends' culturally inverted nihilism on videotape, this being shot by an amateur AV Squad documentarian who calls the mamba-fanged minx out on her seedy and needy mutability as honors student one minute and boricua blanquita the next. (Poor guy: he's forced to do this while Hathaway's sprawled topless on a couch offering herself to him in what may indeed be ironic and taunting tones, but still... James Spader at full-tilt creepy was never so slow on the make. Like Syriana, Gaghan's most recent endeavor, this is what happens when a Soderbergh mentorship goes awry.)

I only mention any of this because Hathaway, apart from looking the way she does -- Amelie's Audrey Tatou without the playpen pout or the New Wave preciousness -- has got charisma and sex appeal like you would not believe. I'm also convinced she's a genuinely magnanimous human being off-camera, since she never once appeared bored or frustrated by the fact that this straight-to-DVD trifle was going to be the thing that finally plugged up her career pigeon hole.

And this felicitous consequence of Havoc redeems the trip to Blockbuster or Amazon. The tween queen is dead. Long live the vamp, the tramp and the femme fatale.