Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber direct Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart and Eric Stoltz in this time travel tragedy.

Donnie Darko for the dim. Back in 2004 when it was released there was no way you’d get me to buy a ticket for an Ashton Kutcher movie made by Final Destination sequel creatives. But a decade down the line it appeared my snobbishness was foolish. A few people had said in passing they loved it and it had a surprisingly high 7.5 IMDB rating… the same current rating as Robocop, Beetle Juice and Brooklyn to give you some context. So I gave The Butterfly Effect a belated but open minded chance. Nope! Turns out I was very much right in 2004. This was fucking dreadful. Although conceptually solid (the time travel works and is neat), the inherent yet gleeless nastiness that each new timeline inflicts on its cast make this a relentlessly depressing watch, sometime elevated by just how tasteless or inept the cast are in their new reality but not in a way that justifies watching until the end. Not even for schadenfreude. There is just no droplet of joy to be wrung out from this flannel. One alternative where Kutcher wakes up a flailing paraplegic sees all the extras laugh at him for falling out of his chair. Just no… That’s a very juvenile idea of a worst case scenario, one that reveals just how emotionally disconnected this is as an experience. Amy Smart is better than the variety of parts given, while Eric Stoltz (as her nonce dad) seems to have the haunted look of a man who almost starred in the Back to the Future films in a better timeline and now by some twisted quirk of fate somehow has ended up in shit like this half heatedly barking orders at children actors behind a camcorder while trying not to spill his fake scotch. It has flavourless look of a TV movie, and the narrative focus and character development of a 500,000 word piece of message board slash fic. The very worst of a bad bunch of films I took a punt on this week, and let us not forget that’s a list that included the execrable The Lawnmower Man. Pretend you live in a reality where this does not exist.

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