REad this review by Michael Booth from the Denver Post. Its hilarious
Time traveling makes Ashton Kutcher's character dumb, dumber
Amy Smart and Ashton Kutcher star in 'The Butterfly Effect,' in which Kutcher's character learns time travel can have drawbacks.
"The Butterfly Effect" takes a unique approach to time travel: Each trip into the past makes Ashton Kutcher dumber.
Luckily, Kutcher's groundbreaking scientific technique for time travel is blissfully simple, so that no matter how dumb he gets, he and his bulletproof shaggy haircut can still escape the latest peril for yet more bonebrained time travel.
The technique is this, and please try to stay with me here: Kutcher looks at his diary, skwunches up his widdle eyeballs and thinks about the past weally, weally hard. The diary letters go all shaky and blurry, and suddenly he's a child again. I think his time machine is an Etch-a-Sketch, but I might have missed something.
The one interesting idea in "Butterfly Effect" is that Kutcher's character, Evan Treborn, goes back in time only to mess with the same three childhood memories over and over in an effort to improve his adult life. He's not swordfighting dinosaurs or playing backup for Elvis. But a dopey script personified by Kutcher's dopey, immutable hair style morphs "Rashomon" into "Dude, Where's My Karma?"
Employing some of the worst child actors since the last session of Congress, "Butterfly" recycles every blue-collar stereotype in the name of working-class authenticity. It then puts a vile spin on the class-ism by attributing everything from kiddie porn to dog mutilation to anyone with the audacity to live among the un-rich.
Forgoing time travel back to an era when 10-year-olds could act, "Butterfly" instead employs another promising psychological technique. When the screenwriters are confronted by the implausibility of their own words, they simply order Evan to black out. Little Evan makes a Cubist drawing of slaying his parents? Blackout! Scrawny Evan escapes prison rape by growing stigmata and convincing his cellmate he's Jesus? Blackout!
But you can't black out all of the people all of the time, so there are frequent spots where it becomes necessary to Etch-a-Sketch some dialogue. Little Tommy beats a teenager bloody with a bar stool and likes pulling heads off dolls, so his sister must observe, "Tommy's been acting real strange lately!" If only she'd thought to warn Evan's dog, who even as she speaks is becoming Fido flambé.
Failure to Warn might appear as a pattern to poor Evan if he weren't growing dimmer on every trip; at one point his mother dangles this sentence right before his bangs: "Just before your father was institutionalized, he ... oh forget it, it's not important."
Since the IQ-reducing time travel may have the same effect on the audience, plot summaries will prove a challenge. Yet we endeavour.
Evan's father is a psycho. We know this because he lives at a hospital called Sunnyvale, which, in Movie World, is where white trash go when their test scores aren't high enough for Bellevue.
After starring unwillingly in a kiddie smut movie directed by his friends' father, (Eric Stoltz), Evan and those friends do bad things. Blowing up a baby is bad, of course, but geez, the dog ... that's truly unforgivable.
Noble, hirsute Evan represses all this long enough to become a promising student at a university where awestruck professors declare he will "change how we humble scientists view memory association." Most of us would settle for changing how we associate that one frat kegger, but Evan is clearly special.
This is when the letters start shaking and Evan goes back to explore important questions, such as how exactly did that baby blow up, and why did his mom never cut his hair. We revisit that child-porn shoot often enough for us all to get arrested, and Evan gets to emote like a 12-year-old while swearing like a sailor.
Will Evan solve the crucial tangle of memories and germinate world peace? Will Evan's new skinhead pals in prison finally shave that tangle of follicles and germinate a new self-image? Believe me, you can sleep well without ever learning the answer.
The original theory of the butterfly effect was that a small movement somewhere in the world could eventually create chaos a hemisphere away. Here's to the theory that small movies instead dissipate somewhere in the larval stage.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!