Pretty good, a bit extreme

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2006)

After being recommended this movie on three different Internet recommendation engines, being told to see it by a good friend, and having half a dozen other people mention it, I figured I had to get around to seeing it. This is generally not a good way to go about seeing a movie because either one's hopes are too high or one wants to dislike it just so that everyone can stop talking about it.
But I liked it. It's a pretty tight psychological thriller, involving a pretty typical storyline about alterations to the past causing the future to to turn out in "unexpected ways"... rarely ever the way the protagonist really wants it to be. "I'll make everything perfect!" he decrees.
Ashton Kutcher is an interesting actor. I think he's a lot like Keira Knightley: both of them CAN act, it's just that if the director doesn't tell them to they won't. However, this movie shows Kutcher's one-up to Knightley in that he actually did act in this one, and Knightley has yet to fully embrace a role (but I haven't seen all of her movies, so who knows on that part).
Anyway, I think the biggest thing that prevented me from giving this movie a higher score is the way the children are presented. I know that children can be damaged, and can do extreme and horrific things, but oftentimes I have a hard time accepting a movie where they find each other and end up the whole group of them hurting each other. It's hard to explain, but it's the same reason why I don't really accept a lot of the contemporary cop dramas... there seems a need in those to get some mentally damaged woman with a completely differently mentally damaged man, and then work out this intricate plot involving how their mental problems cause this huge crime but also hide it in layers of mental instability. Same thing here, I find it pretty difficult to accept four kids from three different families all with their completely separate lives coming together to create specific incident which one just happens to be able to twist around. More than making the story unbelievable, it's a matter of making it seem as if everybody out there is some insane psychopath ready to explode in the right situation... when actually psychopaths are generally kind of rare.
--PolarisDiB