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Hollywood's been pretty dependable in the past for coming up with some pretty terrifying premises, but I don't think any of them quite reach the heights reached for The Butterfly Effect, in which Ashton Kutcher becomes a god-like master of space and time. We have every right to be scared. It strikes me as logically equivelant to leaving mercurially complex dam water pressure monitoring in the hands of a housecat with attention deficit disorder, or putting the button for a nuclear launch at the bottom of a bowl of hamster kibble.
Sadly, it soon becomes clear the tumor isn't life-threatening; giving us our first clue that, despite Kutcher's presence, The Butterfly Effect isn't a comedy at all. This is disappointing. I was almost looking forward to the set-up — kind of a Dude, Where's My Tumor? sort of thing. Narrator: "Jimmy Reynolds had it all... fame, girls, money... but there was one thing he wasn't expecting." [record scratch noise] Ashton Kutcher: "I have a tumor?!" Alas, no. The Butterfly Effect is meant to be taken seriously. Kutcher's tumor is evidently one of those time-traveling jet-pack tumors you've been hearing so much about. Allow me to explain that: when combined with several shaky-cam scenes of Kutcher looking immensely headachey and a few off-the-cuff comments about blackouts he had as a child, this mysterious tumor begins to point towards one inescapable conclusion. That's right: Ashton Kutcher... has a headache. No. Wait. I meant: Ashton Kutcher... can bend the fourth dimension to his will. You will be forgiven if this strikes you as a little far-fetched; I was just as skeptical when the trailer laid it on me. I'd be hard pressed to believe Ashton Kutcher could fold a blanket, let alone the fabric of space-time, without opening up a major artery. But no matter how many obstacles you have to personally overcome in order to buy Kutcher as a time-travelling genius, you have to at least admit that our hero comes to grips with his power at an opportune time. As the trailer progresses, we are shown glimpses of a romance as pure as the driven snow between Kutcher and his most-certainly-doomed girlfriend Amy Smart. I say "doomed" because whenever anything idyllic is shown in a trailer, it's because it's about to be disrupted by men with automatic weapons and/or acts of an automatic weapon-wielding God. Given the skipping-through-the-spring-blossoms ass treacle shown to us here, it's clear we're getting some fairly unambiguous shorthand for "the less famous one is about to die. Spectacularly." Sure enough, Smart kicks the bucket soon after. It isn't actually shown; there's just a bright white flash, a sudden shot of a parked ambulance, then a funeral, leaving the viewer to come to their own conclusions. Given that freedom, I chose to abuse it by imagining Smart getting hit by a radioactive lava-spewing meteorite, driven over by a speeding ambulance, then buried alive — proving that it's always best to simply spell this sort of plot point out. Following the bright white flash/ambulance montage, there is a long, then more long long, then embarrassingly long pan shot of asses, which then melt into Smart's burial scene (below). Not only does it cast an unnecissarily ass-based suspicion over the death — "One of these seven asses is to blame — but which one?" it seems to say — it also easily gives us the most expensive CG shot involving asses dissolving into a funeral that I've ever seen.
Unwilling to let her go, Kutcher leaves a scrawled note on her coffin reading I'LL COME BACK FOR YOU, which might have left us with some unsettling necrophiliac undertones if we weren't so busy wondering when the hell Ashton Kutcher learned how to work a felt-tip marker, let alone properly contract 'I will'. Luckily for Kutcher, he starts dicking around some some old notebooks of his, the walls start wavering, and before you can say "But that makes no se—", Captain Time Tumor blasts off across the Fourth Dimension. While we watch a montage of Kutcher time travelling, a gravelly voice explains: "Think of it like a movie... you can pause, rewind or slow down." That's right—apparently time travel isn't just possible, it's easier to figure out than your DVD player. One can't help but wonder if, when Einstein first theorized about time slowing down the closer one approaches the speed of light, the idea of Ashton Kutcher think-blasting himself back to 1987 using his magical mind-rewind button to save his number one girl was really what he had on his mind. I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. I'll even go out a little further on the same limb and say he's very ashamed on our behalf.
Amy Smart As our time-travel story progresses we are given various Ashton Kutchers throughout history; each of which, we are left to assume, has somehow fucked things up with his girlfriend. In one scenario, for instance, Kutcher travels back in time to prevent Smart's death, does so, then decides almost as an afterthought to beat a man to death with a lead pipe in a park. Ashton is quite sensibly sent to prison, causing a "butterfly effect", if you will, when Amy Smart's life goes to absolute shit with Ashton in jail.
"..." I might respond, pumping you full of nuclear waste, thus sterilizing you. "Is she all right?" Ashton asks a close friend during prison visiting time, during which the friend, with a sad shaking of her head, explains to Kutcher that Smart's not fine at all. We soon find Amy Smart is now some manner of heavily scarred drug-addicted prostitute with, it would seem, ultra-rabies. This, keep in mind, from a mere six months away from Ashton Kutcher while he's in jail. I invite you to think about the overall worthiness of the person Ashton is spending the film trying to save here. Here's a woman who, without Ashton Kutcher, falls to absolute pieces within six months. Without Ashton Kutcher. Think about that. Smart is like one of those Pandas that can't feed itself without a team of zoologists shoving food down its throat with a tube, or can't breed without five muscular Asian men wrestling its genitals into position with tasers. To be completely honest, if that's what it takes, does it deserve to live? If Amy Smart needs Ashton Kutcher to survive, we as a human race must honestly ask ourselves, does she deserve survival? Isn't evolution trying to teach us something here? The saddest thing is that these shenanigans, lord save us, continue. Across various timelines and inter-dimensional alternate realities, we get one inevitable Kutcher mistake after another (blows the house up, gets arrested again, accidentally unscrews skull), and Amy Smart once again starts drooling and shoving rock crack cocaine into her eye sockets in some dank alley. To be honest, it gets a little depressing. We begin to get a pretty comprehensive portrait drawn, and it makes one thing inescapably clear: if Ashton Kutcher leaves this poor woman for ten fucking minutes, she immediately disintegrates and starts mainlining crack into her vagina. It's honestly difficult to drum up the requisite compassion for someone this dangerously close to the edge. Even assuming Ashton saves the day, what happens tomorrow? It's hard to root for a family unit when you know half of it's crumbling like a sand castle in the sun the second Ashton Kutcher makes a ten-minute run for milk and eggs.
Goth Fatty So long as I'm ripping apart the supporting cast, I'd feel remiss in my duties as a reviewer if I didn't bring this up now. Namely: who was that fat goth guy with all the eyeshadow? And were we supposed to find him hilarious or threatening? I was stumped. At the start of the trailer, it seemed clear we were supposed to see the corpulent, eye-shadowed man (as we are invited to see all fat people in films) as some manner of comic relief, capering and jiggling for our amusement as they are wont to do. I include this as figure 1:
Later in the trailer, though, when the music gets creepier-sounding and the crises pile up on our hero, goth fatty makes another appearance, this time breaking a pool cue in two and approaching Kutcher, it would seem, with naught but menace in his enormous heart. We even get one of those comic book-noir camera angles, with goth fatty's face downturned but his eyes glaring upwards, as I've shown here in Figure 2:
By the very conventions of trailer-making, all the dim lighting, eerie music and intimations of violence seem to suggest we are now meant to be terrified of him. And this is where I get confused, because if you think about it — stay with me now — he's still a fat guy in make-up, and therefore by law completely hilarious. For the record, a show of hands, please. Is there anybody out there who would feel the least bit threatened to see this man, who looks like Astroboy crossed with a garbage bag full of cheeseburgers, advancing on them? It's like getting accosted by a fat starfish wearing eyeliner. Worst case scenario, if he charges you, you dodge him for the 30 or so seconds it will take for him to keel over of coronary failure. I'm left feeling only confusion with casting director Carmen Cuba for her odd choice. To the casting directors of Hollywood: we don't ask for much. We seek only to be entertained. We like our heroes square-jawed, our heroines large-breasted, our dog sidekicks plucky and full of vim. And if a fat man wearing make-up shows up onscreen, we want it unambiguously clear that we're allowed to laugh at that man. when you don't give us these assurances, you don't insult our intelligence, and by that path madness lies. From now on, when the villain in a film shows up, I want the music to get all creepy and the bad guy to speak in a thick European accent, have a name like Damian Blacknight, and be played by Jeremy Irons. That way I can turn to my friend and whisper "I think that's the bad guy." And when a fat guy in make-up shows up, I want Benny Hill chase music played so loud throughout his scene that it obscures his dialogue. It's not much to ask, hollywood. Don't let me down here.
Conclusion Our trailer lurches through the motions, showing us more and more Ashton Kutchers throughout history — all, oddly enough, with the same awful haircut. Though the trailer's already asked us to believe Ashton Kutcher as both a time traveller and a flawless speller, I maintain the greatest leap of faith in The Butterfly Effect is that Kutcher could keep a haircut for twenty years without one person suggesting he stop going to Supercuts. At any rate, it seems the more Ashton changes in the past, the greater the ramifications in the present. So if Ashton beats up someone attacking Amy Smart in the past, he returns in the future to discover that the movie he's starring in has turned into a warmed-over Twilight Zone episode. If he says something to Amy about the future in the past, he returns to the present to find a cease-and-desist letter from Ray Bradbury's estate. Or something. For Christ's sake, at least the guy's not getting bitten in the crotch by dogs while he falls down flights of stairs anymore. The Ashton Kutcher canon has to date read like one long fratboy dare, constantly upping the "what film won't he do?" ante to see who'd call whose bluff first. At least he seems to know where his car is in this one. I say let's be charitable, even if it is a thriller with the word 'butterfly' in the title. RATING: |
The
trailer starts out promisingly enough, with Ashton Kutcher receiving a lot
of intense brain pressure, apparently as the result of a tumor (I've
included a picture of this to the right, in case you wanted to frame it
and give it to a special someone as a gift). I'm sure if we as a human
species were being completely honest with one another, any one of us would
admit to wishing some form of tumor-based punishment on Ashton Kutcher.I
know I'm always ready for a little Kutcher-tumorifyin' action after a
solid half-hour of Punk'd (a show in which the entire script seems
to be composed of Ashton mock-punching the camera and saying things like
"in da hizzouse". If there's more to it than this and I just missed it, I
apologize.) 
"Holy shit!" you may say. "Isn't that the very thing he
meant to stop by going back in time?"
