Time-travel thriller about a college student who has suffered memory blackouts since childhood. He discovers that travelling back in time and making even the smallest changes plays havoc with events.
The title, presumably, refers to that strain of chaos theory which insists that when a butterfly flaps in Japan, a wonk like Ashton Kutcher gets to topline his own mov... more >
The title, presumably, refers to that strain of chaos theory which insists that when a butterfly flaps in Japan, a wonk like Ashton Kutcher gets to topline his own movie. Connoisseurs of movie trash should be drawn to any film revolving around what’s going on in this man’s head, but The Butterfly Effect is also notable for one of those can’t-lose movie premises: ever since he was young, Evan Treborn (Kutcher) has suffered mental blackouts that mean whole minutes disappear from his life at crucial moments.
What this amounts to in film terms is that it allows writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber to cut to the chase in any given scene. No sooner has the pre-pubescent Evan been introduced to his best friend’s supposedly ideal dad (Eric Stoltz) than he’s standing naked in front of a camcorder. Heading in for a meeting with his own incarcerated father, Evan finds himself lying on the floor with papa’s hands around his neck. As a college student, Evan eventually learns he can zip into these losses, work out what’s going on, and change the course of events – for better and for worse.
What distinguishes The Butterfly Effect from so much teen product is that it’s constantly surprising, and often as nasty as anything to be found in Final Destination (for whose sequel Bress and Gruber wrote the screenplay). The nastiness here, though, is played at least semi-straight, with a real sense of threat and risk, and a great deal more empathy for the abuse Evan and friends have undergone than any of the disposable teens in Final Destination ever merited. The prologue alone features a dog in a sack being set alight, and an incident involving a mailbox and some explosives which comes to result in the death of a new-born baby; the grown-up Evan gets involved in some reliably lunkish frat house antics before a spell in prison leads to heavy intimations of rape.
The set-up insists that Evan cycles through all possible outcomes of several situations, so it keeps coming up with varyingly cruel punchlines as the hero’s hopes of putting things right are repeatedly dashed. What seems the film’s cruelest reality, in which Evan wakes up in a perversely sunny world where his former girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart) is dating somebody else and any opportunity to correct the situation is put literally out of his hands, gives way to a perhaps even crueler (if we understand it as “cruel to be kind”) sequence allowing the film’s curiously haunting, unexpectedly romantic epilogue.
The two filmmakers juggle high concept with an eye for detail that extends to casting young actors who actually look like juvenile versions of the leads and scenes in which characters go to see the type of movies teenagers might actually have snuck in to see circa 1995. The cast is mixed, but mostly interesting. Kutcher’s natural born cluelessness gets him so far in a narrative which requires the hero not to know what’s going on for long stretches, but he’s about as convincing as a sensitive, journal-keeping neurologist-in-training as might be Shaun William Scott.
Elden Henson (who seems to be in training to play Philip Seymour Hoffman’s younger brother at some stage) is more comfortable in those realities where he’s not asked to play Hollywood brain-damaged; and it’s an insult to Melora Walters that she’s asked to play Kutcher’s mom at this early a stage in her career. Against them, Amy Smart – grossly misused in the recent Starsky & Hutch – is affecting in her first scene as a rundown waitress, and though the mid-section asks her only to play image of romantic perfection, she’s just as good as a scarred hooker who greets long-absent friends with the line “If I knew you were coming, I’d have cleaned the stains off the sheets”. William Lee Scott and the aptly-named Jesse James are also impressive as different incarnations of Kayleigh’s explosive brother Tommy, both actors peddling a superior blend of devil-may-care sadism.
It’s wholly preposterous and undeniably derivative, but its influences – Jacob’s Ladder, Groundhog Day, La Jetee, Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko, even Jamie And The Magic Torch-era animation (Evan has only to read his diary to travel through time and space) – are the right ones, and in its leftfield loopiness, The Butterfly Effect even comes to take on the look of a latter-day Gainsborough melodrama: The Seventh Veil in Abercrombie and Fitch, perhaps, a Britney Of The Seven Moons.
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