Overall Rating
 Awesome: 48.93%
Worth A Look: 22.75%
Average: 11.16%
Pretty Bad: 8.58%
Total Crap: 8.58%
8 reviews, 185 user ratings
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| Butterfly Effect, The |
by Chris Parry
"If you have to make a teen movie, at least try to make it as smart as this."
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SCREENED AT THE 2004 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: If you’d have asked me three hours ago what I think of Ashton Kutcher, I’d have borrowed from Jack Nicholson and told you he can “shampoo my crotch”. Between mugging for the audience on Punk’d and mugging for the audience on That 70’s Show and… heck, I don’t even know what he was doing on Dude, Where’s My Car. So take all that and combine it with a healthy dose of overexposure stemming from Kutcher’s Demi Moore Oedipus Syndrome, and the prospect of going to a movie featuring him as a lead fills me with about as much glee as Mad Cow Disease. But hey, I’m at Sundance, so what am I gonna do – avoid the big show? And bugger me if I’m lying – the flick was really worth the trip.Kutcher is Evan, a kid who has some problems. Every time the stress level rises in his life, he blacks out and wakes up later, with no idea what’s gone down in the past half hour or so. This would be okay if it happened while he was playing X-Box, but when it happens as the neighbor’s kid is about to set fire to your dog, or when your friend’s dad is setting up a video camera and telling you to take your shirt off, you'd have to curse your sense of timing.
So Evan’s psychiatrist recommends that he keep a journal of everything he does, to try to help him jog his memory. But over the following years, as Evan writes everything down religiously, he still blacks out as he and his messed up friends go from misadventure to misdemeanor to felony, and his memories stay blocked out.
Behind all this, Evan’s crazy dad has long the same problem, and while locked away in the nuthouse, he claims to have created a way to go back in time and make bad things better. Before long we see that Evan has inherited the exact same skill, learning that when he reads his old journal entries, he’s zapped back in time to the exact scene described. Once there, Evan makes small changes to try to correct past horrors, but such corrections don’t always turn out as planned.
Which is probably more story than you need to know about the story, but if you saw the trailer, none of what I've just written is news to you. And if you didn’t see the trailer - well, deal.
So anyone who isn’t A) female or B) under 18 is probably muttering to themselves about now, “I don't care if you enjoyed it, there's no way I'm paying to see Kutcher. Forget about it. Not going to happen.” And I can understand that. But, dude, seriously, you’ve got to understand what I’m saying here - this is a good film. No, really. It’s actually good. Very good. Surprisingly good. Good enough to tell people to go see the thing.
Oh sure, it has its problems. The dialogue is far from sparkling, with words such as "irreprehensible" finding their way into the finished script when no such word exists in the English language. You could blame Kutcher for maybe fluffing a line in such an instance, but the rest of the dialogue on offer really isn't much better, rising only just above the level of langugage you might expect if George W. Bush was moonlighting as a screenwriter.
But the cast is almost uniformly top rate – from Kutcher (again, seriously), to Amy Smart as the love of his life, to Melora Walters as his mother, to Elden Henson as his best buddy, to Ethan Suplee as his college roommate. It’s not necessarily that these kids are made to perform acting stunts by the screenplay in front of them, but rather that they’re all (for the most part) genuinely talented indie actors. There are no Rachel Leigh Cook’s or Freddie Prinze Jr’s here. Kutcher is the closest thing you could get right now to being a national flash-in-the-pan pin-up boy, but he handles himself well in this role despite the overwhelming hype surrounding him and his lack of dramatic history. Amy Smart is given the toughest task of the lot, having to take her character to multiple realities, from coke-addled hooker to dolled-up sorority girl, and she does enough with each to prove that she’s far surpassed the "pretty girl” label.
As an aside, it’s great to see Ethan Suplee pushing way out into the mainstream at last. With his recent outing in Cold Mountain, and a good supporting character turn here in a film that is bound to make some money, it surely can’t be long before some smart guy in Hollywood writes a screenplay with a ‘big boned’ guy as the lead, giving Suplee the solo spotlight that his talents have long deserved. It'd be a shame if he spends the best years of his long career filling 'fat guy' roles, when he's got more to offer.
But to me, what really adds to this already impressive film is a sly, cynical, almost 'Very Bad Things'-style dark humor running through the background, causing the audience to giggle at times that they really don't want to giggle. Some critics, generally those who don't get the darker humor or who feel duty-bound to hammer anything Kutcher-related, will assume this is a case of people laughing at the movie rather than with it, but let me tell you, I laughed a lot with The Butterfly Effect, and barring some dialogue whoopsies, there wasn't a time when I rolled my eyes at the thing. To be honest, if I'd gone in with a grudge, I could have sat here and ripped pieces out of this film for the entire length of the review, but what would be the point?
Frankly, if all movies aimed at a teen market were handled as soundly as this... well, let's face it, teenagers would stop going to movies. They're really not very smart, after all (don't even try to defend yourselves, teens, not after making Bad Boys II one of the highest grossing films of the last five years).Well directed, well scored, well paced, well performed, and written well enough to avoid the sort of massive plot holes usually associated with this kind of genre, The Butterfly Effect isn’t Citizen Kane, but it is far and away the best ‘teen’ film that I’ve seen since Ghostworld... Kutcher or not.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8502&reviewer=1
originally posted: 01/17/04 15:39:42
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
23-Jan-2004 (R)
DVD: 06-Jul-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
11-Mar-2004
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