| The Butterfly Effect - **1/2 this and other reviews can be seen at http://www.entropyx.com/randy --------------------------------------------------- The virtue of an excellent idea is lost when you try to take it further than it can go. This, not Ashton Kutcher, is the fundamental flaw of "The Butterfly Effect." It has fun with the paradoxes involved with time travel and changing the past, but it has a little too much fun, cutting back and forth beyond the necessity of the story, ultimately wearing out the novelty of the concept. The story follows Evan Treborn (Logan Lerman before he grows into Ashton Kutcher) through a series of traumatic events in his youth that he never seems to remember, due to his brain blacking said events out, a condition he inherited from his father. After something involving explosives incapacitates his friend Lenny, Evan's mom, in accordance with thriller mom logic, decides they should move away. So Evan leaves his friends behind, despite a vow to come back for his girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart). His college life is the kind of perfect that exists only in movies, and between acing psychology exams, hanging out with his big gothic buddy Thumper (Ethan Suplee) and trying to break new ground in neural technology, he manages to make it back to his hometown to meet up with Kayleigh, a hard-working waitress at a local diner. He wants to dig up the past he can't seem to remember, and she wishes she could black it out like he does. They argue, she cries, he returns to his perfect college life and she dies. As his world collapses, Evan takes a peek into the journals he's kept since forever, and discovers the ability to relive the experiences he's blacked out. But wait, there's more: he is fully capable in these dreams, free to change whatever he can, until he returns to the new, altered real world. Since "The Butterfly Effect" is essentially a thriller, Evan's changes never quite work out, even though he is given more opportunities than both reason and entertainment value dictate, and that's where the film falls apart. Kutcher has taken a lot of grief for this role, his first venture into serious acting, but his performance at least promising. He holds his own in a part that doesn't require much, and despite what you may hear, the biggest flaw in this film is that it doesn't know when to stop, not the casting of a very Affleckian lead. I liked "The Butterfly Effect" right until the moment the script editors took the night off, and that's a shame, because this really could have been something special. |