What if you had the chance to go back to your childhood and change everything bad that happened to you? Would you be willing to do it and more over? would you be able to live with the consequences of those changes? That is the dilemma that Ashton Kutcher is forced to handle in the new film “The Butterfly Effect.”As a child, Evan Treborn suffered from blackouts, the cause for which doctors were unable to find, but tell him to write in notebooks. To make matters worse, he had a very troubled childhood that included a father who was committed to an institution and his girlfriend’s troubled brother. Now in college, Evan is able to revisit his childhood through the journal entries when he comes across his old notebooks. Only then is it realized that he is able to go back in time to those periods during the blackouts and try to change things for the future. The only problem is that when he gets back things are different due to what he changed.
“The Butterfly Effect” is a disturbing thriller that will keep you guessing as to where it is headed next, but at the heart of the movie is a relationship. It is Evan’s affection for his childhood girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart of “Varsity Blues”) that causes him to go back and try to make a better future for them together. The movie also has a message attached about how people are always saying that they want to change something about their past.
Kutcher seems to be one of those actors that people either love or hate, with very little middle ground. Audiences will be surprised to see Kutcher portraying something other than the douchebag persona he has now been so well associated with from “Punk’d” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” There is little of the trademark scream acting that Kutcher has made so famous in the last few years. Here, Kutcher shows the range that he does have, only sometimes wandering away.
Eric Stoltz also appears in the film, following up his 2002 role in “Rules of Attraction” as another creepy guy trying to be in a college film. In that film he was a professor who had a taste for students; here he plays a father who has a taste for little children. Seriously, is this the best kind of role that he can get? Someone needs to throw him a life perserver for his career already!
“The Butterfly Effect” is a creepy thriller that will make you leave the theater thinking: just what you need for those long cold January nights.