The Butterfly Effect Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)January 23rd, 2004
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2004 is officially The Year That Wants To Fuck With Your Mind. Paycheck and Alias want you to buy into the idea of complete memory wipes (insert joke about Bush and the missing WMDs here), while The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Butterfly Effect try to get you believing that memories can be altered if you simply try hard enough.
Effect is, essentially, a live-action version of that "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons where Homer turns his toaster into a time machine, squishes a prehistoric mosquito and warps back into a world where inclement weather means donuts fall from the sky. Right down to the buffoonish star (Ashton Kutcher, Cheaper by the Dozen). He plays college student Evan Treborn, a smart kid who realizes that reading the journals he's kept since he was a kid can magically transport him back in time to particularly traumatic moments of his youth.
While temporarily imprisoned in the past, Evan squashes his mosquitos and returns each time to present day with a nosebleed, a headache, a fat roommate (Ethan Suplee) and vastly different surroundings for himself, his mom (Melora Walters), and his three childhood pals (Amy Smart, Elden Henson and William Lee Scott). Sometimes Evan wakes up as a frat boy. Sometimes he wakes up with no arms. It all depends on what he did on his little time-traveling adventure (hence the title of the film, which is a different way to say The Chaos Theory).
You certainly can't label the debut of filmmaking team Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (they penned the Final Destination 2 screenplay) as "unambitious." They have a lot of fun playing with different outcomes and genuinely keep things much more interesting than they should be. That said, there are huge plot holes in their story, and the ending is a bit of a copout. The real beauty of the Bress/Gruber script, however, is Kutcher (one of the film's executive producers), who technically embodies several different versions of his character but only had to act one way. Big points for understanding the limits of your cast.
1:53 - R for violence, sexual content, language and brief drug use
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