The Butterfly Effect

Directed by: Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber
Starring: Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart

A butterfly flaps its wings in Uganda creating a tiny air current which catches a seed pod floating nearby causing it to change its course and land in a heap of Yak poop where it grows into a flesh eating arthropod and yadda, yadda, yadda the Mets win the world series.

The Butterfly Effect - a premise used to illustrate how the smallest of occurrences can alter outcomes on a much grander scale - has long been a favorite among those who study Chaos Theory and now it’s been crammed into a movie starring Ashton Kutcher for your viewing enjoyment.

The Butterfly Effect chronicles the story of a young man named Evan (Ashton Kutcher) who, since childhood, has suffered blackouts with memory loss, most of which occur among mysterious circumstances involving his close circle of friends: Kayleigh (Amy Smart), the tormented, sexually abused female lead; Tommy (William Lee Scott), Kayleigh’s overbearing, obnoxious, bully of a brother, and Lenny (Elden Henson), the mutual fat friend of them all.

It is early on in his childhood when Evan is urged by his mother and their family psychotherapist to keep a daily journal in order to help him remember what happens during his blackouts, but it is not until later in life, when Evan is in college, that he discovers that by reading back over his journal entries up to the “blackout point” he can travel back in time to re-witness what took place during the blackout and alter the outcome, thereby changing the current present. And while he does this with the most honorable of intentions - to help his friends survive various childhood traumas by attempting to prevent their ever happening - the intrusion into the past never seems to work out better for a greater whole. When he changes one bad event for good, it seems to always change another good for bad, thereby setting off a lifetime of different, and hardly pleasant, consequences.

The most surprising part of this movie is not one of its many twists, it’s the part where Ashton Kutcher plays a dramatic lead….and does it well. Although I am not a huge Ashton Kutcher fan, I will admit that what he does - primarily playing the part of the gangly, air-headed buffoon - he does well. So well in fact that I’d never really thought of the guy as doing anything else. But in The Butterfly Effect Kutcher’s performance is so dead on that it never crossed my mind that this is the same guy who plays the clownish Michael Kelso on That 70’s Show. Kutcher’s Evan is dark, disturbed, and compassionate.

On the whole, this flick is a wild, tripped-out ride in the same vein as Jacob’s Ladder and Twelve Monkeys and its does well to hold its own against the two. The suspense is well woven and its outcomes satisfyingly shocking and unpredictable. The DVD release also sports two endings: the theatrical cut and the director’s cut, and both, though quite different, are rewarding.

I would definitely give this movie “two thumbs up” if that phrase wasn’t copyrighted, but I will give it a big ol’ REWIND button, because it’s absolutely worth seeing again.


Clif

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