van Treborn (Kutcher) has always had a tendency to block out the traumatic events in his life. He has no memories of the incident at his friends' house when their father talked them into taking their clothes off for his video camera. And he doesn't remember what happened after they tried to play a prank on a neighbor by putting a stick of dynamite in her mailbox. All he knows is that something terrible must have happened each time he suffered one of his blackouts. As a method of therapy, the doctor suggests that Evan write his thoughts down in a journal, which he does.
Evan's childhood friends, Lenny (Elden Henson), Tommy (William Lee Scott) and Tommy's sister, Kayleigh (Smart), won't talk about what happened, but the various tragedies they witnessed send them all down paths of self-destruction and mental trauma. Deciding that a change of scenery would be good for her son, Mrs. Treborn announces that they'll be moving. Evan promises Kayleigh that he will come back for her someday and take her away from her "bad" father and "angry" brother.
Years later, as a university student, Evan discovers one of his old journals and starts reading. Suddenly, the world shifts and he finds himself back in the past, experiencing the missing time from one of his blackouts. Anxious to share the news with Kayleigh, he returns to his old neighborhood to find her working as a waitress in a diner. When he tells her he is remembering the past, she gets upset and angry at him for losing touch with her and breaking his promise. That night she commits suicide.
Determined to save Kayleigh from her tragic fate, Evan uses the journals to go back to his blackouts and change the past. What he doesn't expect, however, is that every small change in the past can lead to an entirely different in the present.
A helping of heavy-handed melodrama
Based on the concept of chaos theory, which states that one small change causes a greater change over time, The Butterfly Effect explores some interesting notions about cause and effect. Unfortunately, it uses such clumsy and blatant storytelling tactics that the message of accepting responsibility and the consequences of your actions is nearly lost.
The first-time directing and writing team of Bress and Gruber take great pains to set each reality apart from the others with various tricks, including a wide range of film stocks and color palettes, but the changes are hardly delicate or subtle. In each reality, Evan experiences only the extreme highs and lows of the human condition. The dark turns are horribly dark (molested children, a dog burned alive, death row), while the light aspects are almost comical (sorority girls, sports cars, the religious devotion of a would-be murderer).
Furthermore, the plot is riddled with moth holes. At one point, Evan goes back to an event during which he did not have a blackout, violating the rules of time travel previously established in the film. Some early events are set up (such as an inexplicably morbid drawing Evan does when he's a child) but never paid off, and they fail to establish a through line for many of the characters, which makes their actions seem unjustified and illogical.
What saves the film is Kutcher's surprisingly intense turn as Evan. He displays an intensity he's never shown as the goofy Kelso on That '70s Show or as half of the dimwitted pair in Dude, Where's My Car?. It's also nice to see indie king Eric Stoltz playing against type as Kayleigh's guy-next-door father with secretly perverted tendencies. Still, it's Smart who has the most difficult task of playing several different versions of Kayleigh, including a sorority girl and a heroin-addicted prostitute. Bravely, she continues the current trend of beautiful actresses such as Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron, who have all undergone hours of makeup simply in order to make themselves look homely.
