Promising film, until Ashton entered

Rating: Null/10 (26 July 2004)

I was genuinely surprised when I started watching the butterfly effect. The first 20 minutes are intriguing, and a little bit edgy... but after that, it's pretty much down-hill when Ashton Kutcher steps into the film. Evan Treborn had a twisted childhood. He grew up with an absent father who, upon his first ever meeting with him at a mental asylum, tried to kill him. His two best friends, brother and sister Kayleigh & Tommy Miller were sexually abused by their father, which results in Tommy turning into a brutal, vindictive teenager; and his other friend, Lenny Kagan, is traumatized for life when a practical joke goes wrong. Evan is a strange child, who suffers from a similar mysterious disease as his father; he has black-outs, and he loses his memory of critical moments in his childhood. To try and cure him, his mother gets Evan into the habit of writing down details about his day in journals, to try and jog his memory. When Evan is 13, he moves away from his neighbourhood, leaving his troubled friends behind, and the love of his life, Kayleigh with a promise that he will one day come back for her. (This is where Ashton steps in, and the film goes out the window). Seven years later, Evan is a hard-working Psych major who hasn't had a black-out in 7 years. All seems to be going right for him, until Evan reads over his old journals...and discovers that he can go back in time and change the events of the past to effect the future (hence: butterfly effect, change one thing and everything else changes). The rest is predictable and badly written....
Amy Smart (who plays grown-up Kayleigh) is shocking. There is a scene in which she turns out to be a tough-talking hooker from the school of hard-knocks.... the attempted acting in this scene is just laughable.
Ashton is... well, Ashton. No matter how serious and sometimes dark the film may be, you can't help but shake off that image of him as MTV's punker and Demi's toy boy. I couldn't take him or his acting seriously, i was just waiting for him to pop up during the credits, with his trucker-hat and say something along the lines of "ya'll were punk'd big time... you think this film was for real? Pfft...suckers!". Sorry, maybe it's just me, but Ashton should stick to what he does best; films like dude where's my car and...well....that's pretty much all he can do.
I'll admit that the general ideas behind The Butterfly Effect are worthwhile, but bad acting just ruin a perfectly good film... and occasionally, a bad script too. It's worth a watch, but don't get your hopes too high.