The Butterfly Effect: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

At the start of the Ashton Kutcher movie, “The Butterfly Effect,” audiences are given a brief, punchy primer in chaos theory.

They’re reminded that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, all sorts of chaos can unfold upon the world, with typhoons, hurricanes and the like laying waste to the earth thanks to those seemingly inconsequential butterfly breezes.

It’s fitting, then, that by the end of “The Butterfly Effect,” audiences are reminded of another kind of rippling calamity. If a couple of talentless hacks get the greenlight to make a movie in Hollywood, all of their mindless scribblings can have a similarly disastrous effect, with the world being laid flat by a typhoon of the cinematic variety.

In this case, those hacks are Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, the writing team behind “Final Destination 2,” another movie in which a group of unsuspecting, bewildered twentysomethings met with the most inhospitable of final destinations.

This time out, Bress and Gruber, in their directorial debut, are just as interested in personal ruin, senseless death and general disaster, but they’re also interested in going back to the past to prevent such atrocities from taking place.

The idea is that if their main character, Evan (Kutcher), a troubled college student, can correct his troubled past, then allegedly he and all of his troubled friends will lead less-troubled lives.

You can hardly blame Evan for trying. At the center of “The Butterfly Effect” is a story steeped in pedophilia, child pornography, madness, animal cruelty, a mother and her infant child blown apart by an exploding mailbox, a woman dying of emphysema, amputation, forced prison sex, and the ugliness and squalor of prostitution.

In this movie, it’s all exploitation for the sake of exploitation, with the aforementioned list being just the tip of the horrors sandwiched onto the screen.

How Evan darts back to the past to fix the present is never fully explained, which is a flaw but no real surprise given the laziness of the script.

Still, how he does so goes something like this: By reading the journals he has kept since childhood, Evan is able to remember what he has long since forgotten. When he does so, the world vibrates around him, the pages of his journal shudder and he travels through a time continuum, one that allows him to morph back to the days when he was a child and everything went so spectacularly wrong.

The problem is that Evan can’t seem to make anything right. Time and again, he travels back to the past, with the future becoming increasingly bleak and depressing each time he tampers and returns. Essentially, he’s a well-meaning meddler trying to thwart that old cliché—you can’t change the past. Well, Evan finds a way to do so, but the film becomes increasingly absurd and hilarious with each desperate attempt.

As an actor, Kutcher is just vacant and transparent enough to be mildly interesting, which is no compliment as the interest he generates onscreen comes from watching him struggle with and fail at the craft. Indeed, there are moments here when Kutcher--star of “That ‘70s Show,” MTV’s “Punk’d” and Demi Moore’s love life--is called upon to act, yet each time he does so, audiences might want to travel back in time themselves to ask the directors for another take.

Rounding out the cast are Amy Smart as Kayleigh Miller, the young woman Evan has loved since childhood; William Lee Scott as Tommy Miller, the young man who has been angry since childhood; Eric Stoltz as George Miller, the pedophile who has caused these children more horror than they can bear; and Elden Henson as Lenny, who went insane because of all of it.

Movies like “The Butterfly Effect” don’t want to entertain as much as they want to shock. As such, they’re Hollywood at its worst and most cynical. At my screening, which was packed, I longed to join the handful of people who had the good sense to walk out, but each time the pull of leaving hit me, a whole new low was achieved onscreen, and with it, a reason to stay.

Grade: D-