Like swiss cheese - tasty but full of holes.

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2004)

I should state up front that this review is for the director's cut.
To put it bluntly, this movie suffers from having a smart heart and a stupid brain. Any movie like this requires the viewer to suspend disbelief. In doing so the storytellers have the option to establish replacement rules to govern the universe they've created. This movie sets up well, giving the main character (Evan) blackouts which it will fill in later. However, once Evan ventures into his past to 'fill in' the empty spaces, the movie begins to contradict itself. This would be excusable if it was a lighter, more amusing movie. But this is far from light material. It is extremely morbid. The audience is bombarded with this darkness, which attempts to engage us, to give us something deeper. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much digging before you get frustrated.
For me, there are two particularly frustrating aspects to this film:
First, the tagline of this movie is "change one thing, change everything". As such, I expected that when Evan goes back to change something, everything from that point forward will be different. In other words, if Evan has ten blackouts, and goes back to visit the fifth one, then all the following blackouts would either vanish or be completely different. Instead, the blackouts are always the same. Evan jumps around to whatever blackout is convenient. However, this betrays the movie's central concept. This could have been fixed with a more careful storyline, where the blackouts were visited in reverse order.
The second frustrating aspect is the gross simplifications in Evan's revised histories. When Evan goes back and changes over a decade of history, the effects of his change are summed up far too easily and conveniently, almost as if the other people are all in on some cruel joke being played on Evan. I understand that this is done to keep the pace moving, but again the central theme of "change one thing, change everything". But even after multiple changes, a lot of the world stays pretty much the same.
Comparisons to Donnie Darko are inevitable. Donnie Darko was a superior film in this regard because it did not make the mistake of laying down ground rules and then breaking them. Instead, it hides the rules from the audience and leaves them up for discussion. As a result, you have a much more interesting conversation piece. The Butterfly Effect essentially outsmarts itself by trying too hard.
For some, my comments may seem like cynical over-thinking. This movie has a lot of polish on it to make it look good, and if you want to keep your brain turned off, you may enjoy it considerably. Some people may not like Ashton Kutcher and discredit the movie based on that, but honestly I thought his performance was far more convincing than the script itself.
Like I said before, this movie does have a smart heart. It tries very very hard to bring something interesting to the table. The setup and ending are good, but the path between is too dark for its own good and ultimately a mess of contradictions. 6 out of 10.