Solid sci-fi premise, but certainly at times a hammer to crack a nut

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2019)

Films about "putting right" the time stream are not exactly a rarity, so many may ask whether resort to a 2004 movie makes any sense.
My answer would be yes, but there are a couple of powerful provisos. On the plus side, this film from Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber takes the genre as far as it can reasonably be taken, as we get to see a great many alternative scenarios for the life of our hero Evan (that's a pretty effective Ashton Kutcher in the adult version, but also two other pretty good child actors) plus his mother and the people around him. So if you want to follow through these kinds of thought experiments in detail (for reasons best known to yourself!), you'll probably never get a better and fuller chance than with this movie...
And a few of those versions of the lives lived even have moments of humour or at least black comedy about them. But this is not the typical case, as most are pretty serious; and indeed this film has to go into deeply awful and dark stuff in order to present its key idea. For Evan has a motivation to rework his life because at at least 3 moments along the track things happened that were so bad that the effort and risk of the reworking are made to seem worthwhile. There is logic to that, but it makes for grim and uncomfortable watching indeed.
Surprising then that we have room for quite a strong romantic story, in which the lovely Kayleigh (that's Amy Smart in the adult version at least) has fortunes going up and down like a yo-yo depending on which line Evan has managed to tweak.
And if the main moral here (of solely academic relevance, naturally) is that each reworked timeline has its winners and losers and trying to make things better very often makes them worse, the subsidiary emotion is one familiar to most of us about the what-ifs of love and relationships, which primarily resolves itself into Byron's famously bleak quote: "of all the words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these - it might have been". Tennyson springs equally to mind, with the question "Tis better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all". As noted, these are suprisingly deep and compelling emotions for a film that also dwells upon child molestation, psychopathy, murder, cancer, father-son murder, betrayal and a great many other heavy topics.
But all for the sake of suggesting to us that the dye is not cast on anybody's life, with things always having a range of alternative directions to follow, rather than just one (even if the same points may be reached along several parallel paths).
So there we are - it seems very much like a hammer to crack a nut, given the vicarious (and quite genuinely tangble) horror and disgust we may experience here at times, even as we have the occasional smile, and certainly feel pangs of romantic longing.
Is it just exploitation, in the end?
I say no, as somehow for me this still makes for good storytelling and film-making, but surely a fine line has been trodden here...
Any film that features an Oasis track must have its merits, and here we have the telling words of "Stop crying your heart out" to mull on as the final credits roll. And when they do, I for one feel I've had a powerful and meaningful experience. Hence any slight doubts are erased by 98% at least (though not 100%).