Overall Rating
 Awesome: 48.55%
Worth A Look: 22.82%
Average: 11.62%
Pretty Bad: 8.3%
Total Crap: 8.71%
8 reviews, 193 user ratings
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| Butterfly Effect, The |
by dionwr
"It's a miserable life"
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"The Butterfly Effect" is a Twilight Zone episode without the ending payoff, which is to say that it lacks what it needs to make it, ultimately, worth seeing.That's too bad, because the film manages to be intriguing and draw you along on a scene-by-scene basis, until you reach overload as the writer/directors keep throwing in stuff, looking around for a decent ending. One of the pleasures of this type of Twilight Zone fantasy is when they come up with something clever to tie it all up at the end, and these folks don't deliver that.
The filmmakers, Eric Bless and J. Mackye Gruber, are the team that brought us "Final Destination 2," Despite that, this film actually shows signs of talent, although they are still searching for some inspiration to make them stand out, in any way, from the crowd. Which is also, coincidentally, a fair description of the leads to the movie, Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart, two models-turning-actors (the process is *definitely* not finished). But it didn't suck, and with respect to "Final Destination 2," that is progress. On the basis of "Final Destination 2," I would have put the odds as a probable twelve to seven that these guys couldn't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.
Kutcher plays a guy who discovers he can travel back into his past and re-arrange how things happened, a common wish that was actually the subject of several Twilight Zone episodes. Unfortunately, the imagination of Bless and Gruber don't know from subtle, and so they load his life and those of the people around him with enough BIG HONKIN' TRAUMA to fill up five or six movies.
Kutcher has so many awful things happen to him you keep thinking they should have just had a black cloud following him around, like Joe Bfstplk, the perpetual jinx from the old "Li'l Abner" comic strip. Encounters with a pedophile, his criminally insane father trying to kill him, a psychotic bully setting fire to his dog--dudes, dial it back a bit!
"Butterfly Effect"'s lack of imagination is also evident in that all the changes Kutcher makes to his past affect only himself and the four people closest to him. This makes the movie come off as arbitrary and capricious. You don't have the sense of a real people in an extraordinary situation, but of a game being played, and the characters as pieces.
Another weakness in the film is that the grown-up actors just aren't as good as the youngsters who play them in the flashbacks (John Patrick Amedori and Irene Gorovaia, mostly). At the center of the film, Mr. Kutcher's efforts never rise above being a really good try. This reviewer hasn't seen the TV shows with which he established his reputation, but I had seen, "Dude, Where's My Car?" and despite the thin and silly nature of the material, Kutcher managed to pull off the easy-going comedy bits there with an unforced ability I thought had potential.
But faced with his first role in a supposedly serious drama, Kutcher tries to show he's being serious by grimacing, mostly. He grimaces to distinction, and in a wide variety of ways, but it is not enough to sell the part. He does better in the scene when he comes back from one of his jaunts into the past to discover that he has no hands. He plays that one for comedy, and manages to make it work. His indignant shock at being handicapped (which the audience was way ahead of him on), gets a huge laugh which the film, by that point, badly needed.
The final problem with the film is the ending, which I will not spoil. Or spoil further, I will say, as it was the point in which the film absolutely breaks down. They went for pathos, and missed.
That was a mistake in itself, as another aspect of this type of romantic fantasy is that you want it to work out well. The hero should learn that he's not a god, or get the girl, or, ideally, both. "The Butterfly Effect" doesn't do either.Still, it doesn't suck. Just wastes your time
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8502&reviewer=301
originally posted: 01/29/04 21:07:52
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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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