There's little cause to really appreciate the 'Butterfly Effect'

A superb performance from Ashton Kutcher can't save the bad film.
By MILAN PAURICH
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
A cheesy teen horror flick with metaphysical pretensions, "The Butterfly Effect" plays like an early M. Night Shyamalan script that the "Sixth Sense" director wisely excised from his r & eacute;sum & eacute;.
In his first-ever dramatic role, "That '70s Show" star Ashton Kutcher does more for the film than it does for him. In fact, without Kutcher's surprisingly adept performance and marquee value, "Butterfly" would have probably been relegated to home video.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a directionless young college student nursing a serious case of arrested development. Evan blames his unsatisfying present on a traumatic childhood incident -- something to do with a neighborhood pedophile (Eric Stoltz) and a video camera. Upon discovering that he can travel back in time just by reading his diary, Evan decides to make things right once and for all.
Offsetting balance
The problem is, every time he changes something from the past, it offsets the balance of everything in the present. ("Every action has a reaction" and all that jazz.) Apparently Evan never heard the phrase "leave well enough alone."
For a while, it's easy to suspend our disbelief since the high-concept premise is such an undeniable grabber. Who hasn't wanted to alter their destiny at one point or another? Too bad the directing-writing team of Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber uses the gimmick in the service of a hackneyed slasher movie plot.
Evan's major reason for wanting to rewrite history is to help childhood sweetheart Kayleigh (Amy Smart). He's still harboring guilt for having abandoned her seven years earlier when he and his single mom (Melora Walters) moved away. (Kayleigh's father was the camcorder creep who made them and their friends do unmentionable things down in the basement.)
Each time Evan returns to the present day after tampering with the past, his current reality is altered. In one scenario, Evan is imprisoned on a murder rap; in another, he's a paraplegic.
Kayleigh doesn't have it much better. She's either a strung-out junkie hooker or a dim-bulb sorority chick. Personally, I think Evan's troubles stem from having watched a double-feature of "Seven" and "Dumb and Dumber" down at the local bijou when he was 13 years old, but that's just me.
Chaotic
Bress and Gruber's screenplay is nothing if not ambitious; it's also exceedingly cluttered. We're so busy leaping back and forth in time trying to make sense of Evan's latest alternate universe that it's tough keeping track of exactly who's who, how they got that way and what it's all supposed to mean. (Three actors play the lead characters in multiple time frames.)
How ironic that a movie that takes the Chaos Theory as its creative inspiration should turn out to be so disorganized, sloppy and confusing.
Nice job in your first serious role, though, Ashton. Try picking a better script to display those formidable acting chops next time.