Don't believe the anti-hype

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2004)

Black-outs plague a young boy, Evan Treborn, during his often traumatic upbringing. An upbringing that eventually places him at college, but leads his childhood friends to ruin. In order to help recover his memories during his black-outs, Evan begins writing journals to keep a record of his days. As an adult, he discovers the ability to travel back to those blacked-out moments in his history by re-reading his early accounts of those times. He further discovers that in his travels, he can alter the course of events, and attempts to use this ability to improve the present for himself and his friends. Unfortunately, every "improvement" he tries to make backfires in some unforseen and disastrous way.
Words fail to describe my confusion over the backlash against this movie. The story is intriguing and extremely well told, all the way through to the end. The effects are appropriately minimal. The violence, excessive to some, actually remains in the character of a given scene without being gratuitous. The acting, though not the best in Hollywood's history, is certainly believable and well-done.
Ashton Kutcher in particular has proved himself capable of serious acting. Anyone who feels otherwise has given in to prejudices spawned by Kutcher's earlier films. Such individuals need to recall Tom Hanks' and Jim Carey's careers, and give Ashton Kutcher a chance to develop his own career as well.