Not as bad as the critics say

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2004)

Butterfly Effect is not nearly as bad as the critics will have you believe, but that's not exactly high praise. The plot concerns Ashton Kutcher's Evan, a college psych major who discovers that by reading aloud from his journals he can return to the most traumatic moments in his life and change them, thereby changing his own past present and future and that of those around him.
The critical savagery of Butterfly Effect is probably fifty percent due to the omnipresence of Demi Moore boyfriend Ashton Kutcher in the media, and fifty percent due to the fact that it's an average execution of an intriguing premise. The thing that surprises me most about the reaction to the film is that many of the critics who hate it attack Ashton Kutcher's persona rather than his performance. It's as if they can't forgive the star of Dude Where's My Car and MTV's Punk'd of trying to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, these same critics give the film a pass for it's irresponsible depiction of children.
The film takes a while to get going (Kutcher's does not appear in the films first half hour, which is essentially back story). The first act of the film belongs to the main characters as children, first as grade -schoolers then as teen-agers. In rather rapid succession we see these kids coerced into sex and child pornography by a pedophile, murder a dog, inadvertently kill a mother and her infant child and engage in brutal physical attacks upon one another.
Now, I'm the last one to call for the censorship of an artist, but I feel that it takes a very sensitive filmmaker to approach topics such as these without appearing to exploit the children it presents. This is true even when the subject of the film is child abuse, and it certainly true when child abuse is merely a plot device in a sci-fi thriller.
In his dramatic debut, Kutcher give a competent performance as do his supporting cast who must inhabit several different versions of themselves in Evan's different realities (particularly Amy Smart, who goes from waitress to sorority girl to prostitute). The casting of the kids at various ages was very well done. I'll even forgive the gaping plot holes that seem unavoidable in time-travel movies (like when a prison bound Evan goes back in time and changes one thing about his physical appearance, but it has no further repercussions, when the whole point behind the butterfly effect is that small changes can have huge and unpredictable repercussions).
However the film is overlong, feels rather structure-less and completely falls apart in the end. The characters and their dialogue are perfunctory for a thriller. It's average at best before you factor in the rather callous treatment of very sensitive issues regarding children.