The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) - B+ [director's cut]

Fun to watch this again; everyone wrote it off as "goofy" three years ago, but I think people were actually responding to its brazenness, the extent to which it was willing to follow its premise to some genuinely (and perhaps incongruously) dark and unexpected places. Some of the small details are actually pretty silly (Evan's disturbing second-grade drawing looks like the work of a young Picasso; Kaylie's smooching her boyfriend just after a despondent and armless (!) Evan confesses his undying love seems a bit insensitive; Ashton Kuthcer is as intractable a presence as ever; etc., etc.) and there are serious metaphysical problems with the way the film plays out its time travel conceit (Why, aside from storytelling convenience, do all of the memories of the "newly created" Evan get "loaded" into the version of Evan that we've been following? Wouldn't his life have just continued uninterrupted all those years? The movie seems to assume that he has some sort of primary soul and that everything else is filler, which is a hell of an assumption.), but the movie's made with undeniable skill and a lot of guts; the "blackouts," in particular, are a terrific suspense device that's actually given some substance later on, and the way the script fills in the holes is neat, if not always perfectly logical. The new ending would have played into the hands of those who called the film goofy, but it packs a punch if you're willing to play along. I liked it then and I like it now.