Beard maketh not the man!

Rating: Null/10 (23 April 2004)

That classic Hollywood synthesis of a miscast pretty boy trying desperately to impress and a useless premise masquerading as drama, The Butterfly Effect irks me most because it could have been brilliant. Okay, so the script flails and sinks like a paraplegic in a vat of treacle. Yes, the performances are a uniform Dulux White Emulsion of bland featurelessness. Admittedly, the politics are about as offensively misjudged as you could expect from the great morality vacuum of Hollywood. Underneath it all, however, there is a great film struggling to get out.
No, not really.
In a desperate bid to appeal to everybody, this film ends up appealing only to the niche market of 13 year old girls, and even then they'd have to be masochists to cope with it. By the time the movie has fudged on from its desperately unsatisfying opening you'd need an eye-opener of Clockwork Orange proportions to keep your vision fixed on the screen. If you're waiting for that, you'll be waiting forever. The film unfolds (or should that be dribbles on?) with a tedious inevitability, made worse by the muddled politics. Do we hate Jocks for bullying Sonic the Goth-hog (apologies!) or do we consider their lifestyle to be the Mecca for which the only alternative is crack-whore or amputee? While Amy Smart manages to drag a series of fair performances from the Dressing-up box of useless female roles, Kutcher is a cardboard cut-out. He is cast as a modern Goldilocks, spurning realities for being too normal, too gay or too cripple-y, all the while coming across as the only character he is capable of playing : a self-important frat-tw*t with the performance nuances of a Real Doll and the emotional depth of a particularly perky dinner plate.
Oh, and while I'm on a flow, if anybody truly thinks that Paedophilia is cured by young boys shouting at you then you have a Daily Mail grasp of mental illness and perhaps this film is for you, with its racist, misogynist and worthlessly contrived construction simply adding a layer of dog eggs to the faecal mix. Is the audience really supposed to cheer Kutcher as he commits genocide because the victims are all very bad men who do naughty things? Maybe he should take a blade to the directors and save the world from this steaming mess? (Please nobody do this, it is better that they live in shame)
Dear God, don't see this film. The risible ending, the laughable characters and the jaw-dropping insensitivity of the central subject matter are more than enough to make me beg for health warnings on posters.