Directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. 113 minutes.
Starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Elden Henson, Ethan Supplee, Eric Stoltz, William Lee Scott, and Melora Walters. Released by New Line Cinema.
The Butterfly Effect is a film of numerous engrossing moments, held together by a rather nonsensical premise, that never really merge into a successful film. The film, strangely enough, for an assumingly low budget thriller with teen actors, shows promise for its directors’ talents and is fairly ambitious. At the same time, the story’s plot is filled with loopholes so big that Los Angeles could squeeze through one of them unnoticed. As the film opens, we have a quote about Chaos Theory, which, in essence, believes that even a small tremor in some minute corner of the world can cause great change in another corner, perhaps even years later. It gives an example of a butterfly flapping its wings, resulting in a tidal wave in another part of the world. It’s an interesting concept and a shame that it was not put to better use.
Ashton Kutcher, who has taken a bashing sort of like Keanu has for being somewhat stiff onscreen, is fairly good here as Evan, a young man who, throughout his entire life, has relapses in his memory. He inherited the disease from his father who has been locked away in a mental institution, though we never really discover why. A crime is hinted at, but never explained. Evan lives with his mother, played by Melora Walters, who is disturbed when she finds her son drawing pictures of bloody carnage and standing in the kitchen brandishing a very big knife.
The first part of the film is the most ambitious. For starters, the opening twenty minutes (or maybe longer) is dedicated completely to our child actors, who will later grow to be Kutcher, Kayleigh (Amy Smart), Tommy (William Lee Scott), and Lenny (Elden Henson). The film’s stars aren’t seen until a significant while into the film, the directors depending on their story, which, though muddled, has moments of intrigue, rather than familiar faces. It is during these scenes that we experience moments that are truly unsettling, so much so that people in the audience actually responded by gasping and saying “what the hell?” The first involves a scene in which an explosive device is placed in a mailbox as a prank. The film keeps cutting back and forth to the scene to the point where we just want to get the moment over with. We know the mailbox will explode, but with who near it?
The second scene during the childhood moments involves something slightly more risky. Eric Stoltz plays the father to young Kayleigh and brute Tommy and has some problems. He makes his children, along with Evan, stand in front of his newly bought camera and take off their clothes. In most Hollywood films, this would be eluded to. Here, we actually experience it, of course, without the actual nudity. The scene is effective in that it is disturbing, yet I don’t know if I am disturbed by the mere subject matter, which most people would be disquieted by, or the fact that it feels slightly unnecessary to the film. It reminded me of a similar scene in last year’s The Life of David Gale, an offensive film that included an extremely exploitative scene also involving a video camera. In The Butterfly Effect, the directors also seem to be including the scene as shock value, which works, but is slightly exploitative as well.
It would be futile for me to continue explaining the plot, for that would take several pages, not because it is that complex, but more because it switches gears more than a few times. The basic premise is, though here is where I yearned for more fulfillment, Kutcher’s character finds a way to travel back into the past in his thoughts, changing detrimental moments in his life and in the lives of others, and this somehow alters the course of history. This I don’t understand, not because the film is deeper than I am able to venture philosophically, but because the directors expect us to take Kutcher’s gift/curse at face value. They simply say he can change the past once he gets over his memory lapses by going back in time and replaying the situation to his advantage, so there! The follow through on his playing with time is unsatisfying too because he somehow remembers the lives he has lived, though they no longer exist because he went back and changed them. His ability to retain memories from the lives that no longer exist is simply to his advantage for the sake of the plot. I know this sounds confusing, but…it is.
There are moments here I liked. The scenes with the children are mostly good, though Tommy’s character is so reprehensible that it is a bit hard to swallow. Why, exactly, does he want to set Evan’s dog on fire? Some of the later scenes are also intriguing, but a film in which the lead character ends up as a mental patient, armless, an inmate offering oral sex to hardened criminals, a frat boy, a science wiz, and a murderer all in the course of 113 minutes, is a bit exhausting. The directors, Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, show some visual flair and promise of a better film next time, perhaps. They use the Chaos Theory quote at the beginning of the film, which suits the story well. For their next project, however, I have a quote that they can hopefully take to heart- “less is more.”