World Without Kelso

Rating: 2/10 (4 February 2006)

In The Butterfly Effect, Ashton Kutcher stars as The Guy With The Worst Childhood, Ever. Not only does he have a bizarre, hereditary brain defect that causes him to black out the stressful experiences in his life, he has to deal with pedophiles, sociopaths, an angry/jealous brother-of-girlfriend, separation from his friends, regular visits to a creepy sanitarium, a crazy dad, and being an accomplice to manslaughter. Seems like a lot, right? And it certainly takes a long time to set all that up, particularly when you have to include a number of carefully timed blackouts to drive the plot of the second-half of the film.
Finally, though, we reach present-day, grown-up-and-going'-to-college Ashton, and you'd think that now the film will get rolling - but you'd be wrong. There's quite a bit of noodling around, showing how screwed up everyone's life is, and quite a bit of time goes by before Ashton figures out that he can leap, Bakula-like, into the times of his blackouts to change things. Then - well, you can't really say that a film this slow-paced really gets rolling, but it does begin to show signs of movement. First thing he does is attempt to straighten out his girlfriend, Kaylee (I'm not sure on the spelling, but that'll do). He manages to turn her and himself into boring frat clones, but screws her brother Tommy up worse, ends up killing him in self defense, and gets sent to prison. (Could anyone explain to me how someone with no priors, awaiting trial, and with an iron-clad self-defense plea gets sent to the general prison population instead of getting bail or release? I didn't think so.)
This, of course, sets off a string of further quantum leaps, each one erasing a traumatic event from his past, but screwing up everyone else's life worse. Things finally get so bad, Ashton decides to erase his own existence by leaping back to his birth and strangling himself in the womb. We're then treated to a montage of how wonderful everyone's life is without him. That's right, folks, the final message of this movie is that a world without Ashton Kutcher is a world without pain. Come to think of it, they might have a point.