Running Time: 113 minutes
Rating: R
I respect the idea of The Butterfly Effect. The idea that we could magically go back in time (which, thank God, they don’t try to explain) and change an event that had a drastic impact on our life is a tempting, compelling one. But the movie doesn’t have the confidence in its own storyline to just go with that as a plot. Instead it throws in childhood murder, pedophilia, animal killing, and blackouts into the mix just to spice things up. Eventually there is just so much jammed
We first see Evan as a seven-year-old who experiences strange blackouts. His mother (Melora Waters) first becomes aware of this because of strange drawings (amazingly stylized for a seven-year-old) depicting murders that he claims not to remember having done. After being taken to a psychiatric institution (conveniently the same one that his father is in) he is told to write about his day, every day, in journals so that if he has a blackout he can know when he was out of it. Pretty soon, he is conveniently having blackouts every single time something traumatic happens to him: when his father attacks him in the psychiatric hospital (and is subsequently beaten to death), when his best friend, Kayleigh’s, father decides to make kiddie porn, and when he’s older and become a “bad-ass” (the scenes of him and his friends smoking and swearing are unintentionally hilarious) and they blow up a mailbox with dire consequences. These blackouts continue through an incident where Kayleigh’s brother, Tommy, (who’s angry about Evan and Kayleigh’s budding relationship) kills Evan’s dog. Evan’s mother finally decides to leave the area and the blackouts stop through college.
We next see Evan about to graduate college as a psychology major and one day, he decides to reread his journals. While re-reading the one about the blown-up mailbox, he’s able to remember what happened and through a visit with a grown-up, mentally disturbed Lenny (Elden Henson) he confirms it. Then, he decides to find Kayleigh (Amy Smart) and ask her what happened during his blackout with the kiddie porn. He travels back home, sees her and disturbs her so much (not really, but the plot needs it to happen, so…) that she kills herself. He decides if the kiddie porn had never happened, she wouldn’t have killed herself so he reads that journal part and corrects it so that they grew up together and now are happily going out in college. But there are also unintended results: he’s become a frat boy, he has different friends, and Tommy’s nuttier than ever. After their idyllic existence ends tragically, he continues to go back again and again, worsening his condition.
This would all be a very interesting story if the filmmakers (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber) didn’t insist on making the blackout events so melodramatically huge. Finding out that they wrote Final Destination 2 makes that point less surprising. Do you know many kids who were involved in kiddie porn, animal cruelty, and 2nd degree homicide? There are very few and all of this stuff happening to Evan goes by so quickly (in the first thirty minutes or so) that it just seems silly. When Evan grows up and alters his life every ten minutes, the consequences are so gruesome and different that, again, it seems more silly than realistic. In fact, it almost seems as if Bress and Gruber wrote the script thinking: see Ashton limbless, see him offer to give a blow-job in prison, see him as a frat-boy! Wouldn’t there have been more emotion involved if the choices Evan had made were small and minute and he would have had to think long and hard about what to change? The movie understands that point at the end, but not nearly soon enough.
The acting isn’t that bad, but entering the second hour when every time-traveling escapade results in a wild character shift, the viewer realizes that they’re merely watching each actor do a stunt. See Kayleigh go from wash-out to sorority girl to hooker. Again, the acting suffers as a result of these huge, comical shifts. Kutcher comes out reasonably unscathed in all this. His shifts in character are credible enough and the unintentional giggles I experienced were more from his well-known character on That 70s’ Show than any real acting problems.
The movie’s depiction of violence is so explicit at the beginning that it’s clear that the filmmakers have no intent to be subtle, therefore they lose their chance to make a really impacting, lasting movie. The movie’s intent is clearly to shock and surprise, but this is such an example of opportunity lost that I wasn’t particularly impressed. If Evan goes back in time and changes something drastically, of course the impact in the future will be huge. A more interesting movie, to me, would be if Evan had to go back in time and maybe get popcorn at the movies instead of nothing. That minor change; what would that bring?