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THE
BUTTERFLY EFFECT
7/10
USA
2004 : J Mackye GRUBER & Eric BRESS : 113 mins
Not since
the pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves has there been a young Hollywood star
who’s had the mickey taken out of him quite so much as Ashton Kutcher.
Ever since he started dating Demi Moore, he’s been ridiculed as a ‘himbo’
toy-boy, a lunk-headed buffoon of what might charitably be described as
‘limited’ acting ability. The many critics who’ve panned his first solo-lead
movie – twisty time-travel thriller The Butterfly Effect – have
made some unkind comments about how convincingly Kutcher portrays befuddled,
my-brain-hurts confusion on screen... the exact same type of barbs thrown
at Reeves when he made the not-dissimilar Johnny Mnemonic.
But whereas
Mnemonic is best remembered as a box-office belly-flop, Butterfly
soared surprisingly high in the US
movie-charts, reaching nationwide number one and remaining on hundreds
of screens more than two months after it opened. So much for the (usually
quite accurate) predictive powers of Variety magazine’s Todd McCarthy,
who sniffed that the film “is poised for a theatrical life span scarcely
longer than that of its eponymous insect.”
Just like
Reeves - who earned famously astronomical sums from his Wachowski Brothers
collaborations M - Kutcher has had the financial last laugh. But
this isn’t a first for the genial Iowan: his earlier comedies Dude,
Where’s My Car and Cheaper
By the Dozen (where he’s riotous in a lengthy, unbilled cameo)
both dramatically exceeded box-office expectations. And rightly so: both
were, despite severe critical drubbings, surprisingly enjoyable romps.
The Butterfly
Effect, though dealing with infinitely more serious subject-matter
(for starters: baby-murder; child sexual abuse; terminal cancer; limb-loss;
prison-rape at the hands of neo-Nazis; incest; prostitution), is also
much, much more fun that it really has any right to be. McCarthy was right
when he said that the film “grows more ridiculous by the quarter-hour”
- but wrong in assuming that this is such a bad thing. In fact, the more
preposterous, implausible, absurd and nonsensical The Butterfly Effect
becomes, the more entertaining the results.
The basic
premise isn’t exactly original – writer-directors Gruber and Bress (who
did Final Destination 2) essentially take the by-now-familiar altering-the-past-alters-the-present
elements of Back to the Future, Time After Time, Frequency
(and the early stretches of The
Time Machine) and push them to amusingly wild extremes.The
title (also used by a rather less way-out Spanish movie from 1996) refers
to the chaos-theory concept by which a butterfly flapping its wings on
one side of the world can unknowingly set off a chain of cause and effect
resulting in a typhoon on the other – see the opening scenes of Austrian
art-house award-winner Free
Radicals for a disarmingly literal visualisation of this idea.
Twenty-year-old
Evan Treborn (Kutcher) discovers that, by reading aloud the journals he’s
kept since the age of seven, he’s somehow transported back in time – knowing
then what he knows ‘now’. So of course he alters events to prevent nasty
things occurring to himself, his friends, his mother (Melora Walters),
his cute pet dog Crockett, and the love of his life, Kayleigh (Amy Smart).
Needless to say, complications occur – and soon Evan finds himself frantically
jumping back and forth in time to avert the disasters and tragedies his
time-meddling have inadvertently triggered...
Hats off to
Bress, Gruber and editor Peter Amundson for spinning out what is essentially
pulpy B-movie material to a theoretically unsustainable 113 minutes. The
first, somewhat Stephen King-ish section – showing Evan’s troubled childhood
– is surprisingly lengthy, but creates a viscerally unsettling atmosphere
of dread punctuated with some jolting shocks. The contribution of a young
performer named Jesse James is crucial to these sequences – as Kayleigh’s
brother Tommy, James socks over a characterisation of chillingly believable
malevolence and volatility. But Tommy isn’t just a pint-sized figure of
evil – the film makes it clear that Tommy’s dysfunction is due to the
influence of his paedophile father (Eric Stoltz): thus misery and horror
are passed down from generation to generation.
Likewise,
Evan suffers from an unfortunate inheritance – his time-travel ability
is somehow genetic, as his institutionalised father Jason (Callum Keith
Rennie) knows only to well. The film-makers don’t bother to explain any
of this, of course, which is just as well - fussing over considerations
of logic would only get in the way of what is an unexpectedly gripping
yarn. The pace never lets up as the plot takes increasingly jaw-dropping
turns, and the whole thing is played admirably straight by the talent
on both sides of the camera. Unlike, say, the rather more ambitious Donnie
Darko, the complicated Phil-Dickian time-travel storylines do
actually tie together quite well, and the film is never at all hard to
keep track of – even for a lunk-headed Hollywood buffoon...
2nd April,
2004
(seen same day : Vue [formerly Warner Village], Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
by Neil
Young
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