The Butterfly Effect

Directed By Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber
Starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Melora Walters, Eric Stoltz

Given a time machine, your reviewer would, naturally, zap back to meet the young Adolf Hitler and, if not kill the bastard outright, at least convince him to stick with the painting thing instead of the taking-over-the-world thing. But second on our list of whose future to alter would be Ashton Kutcher, whose TV-dominating, Demi-squiring omnipresence has now reached unacceptably irritating levels.

At least that was the case before we saw the utterly preposterous but hugely enjoyable Butterfly Effect, which vividly illustrates the dangers of messing around with the past. Kutcher plays a college student who can’t remember chunks of his childhood. This is a good thing, given that his formative years contained such traumas as watching his dog be burned alive and nearly getting killed by his nuthatch-dwelling pa.

But in a journal reading–related plot development best not examined too closely, our hero develops the ability to reinhabit his younger self’s body and change history. Hurrah! Except that every time he returns to the present, he discovers that his temporal tinkering has actually made matters worse. In the wake of one backward trip, for example, he discovers that his true love (Amy Smart) has become a crack whore and, in an even grimmer scenario, he has turned into a douchebag frat boy.

In short, what could have been a fuzzy time-travel comedy à la Back to the Future turns out to be a neo-horror film of much more entertainingly nasty dimensions (you will not believe the scene in which Kutcher travels back in time to give himself stigmata scars).

True, a fair amount of the dialogue plain stinks, and the Punk’d frontman looks mildly uncomfortable in whatever alternate present he has created. But The Butterfly Effect, which Kutcher also executive-produced, must already be a strong contender for the most unexpectedly entertaining release of the year. Not to mention the only one to feature a vastly overweight goth sex god, Eric Stoltz as the world’s suavest child molester and a reference to “donkey acts.”