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Dude, where's my Kutcher?
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, February 5, 2004
While studio thrillers decked out in sweaty gossip-hyped celebrity skin typically don't surprise me, ad campaigns never cease to.
The discrepancies between the image of the film sold in TV spots, theatrical trailers and movie posters and the actual film can make standouts in the typical weekend shuffle even more satisfying. "The Rules of Attraction" and "Solaris" top my list of great films sold as completely different films.
I'm penciling the middle-brow thriller "Butterfly Effect" in for a close third.
Demi Moore's red carpet wrist-band Ashton Kutcher is Evan Treborn, troubled collegiate hunk who discovers he has the ability to traverse time through entries in his diary. From the trailer we can see that his attempts to reclaim a childhood love (Amy Smart) create hemorrhages in reality, hence the title, which comes from chaos theorist Edward Lorenz who once held a conference titled "Predictability: Can the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"
But what the official version of the film doesn't include could be an entirely different film, much of it dealing with Treborn's messed-up childhood.
The entry-points through which he can change his past are moments of serious childhood trauma. When the young Treborn (played by Logan Lerman at age 7 and John Patrick Amedore at age 13) reaches a panicked moment, he blacks out and the audience is hit with a slap-in-the-face jump-cut.
By reading his journals, Treborn (now played by Kutcher) re-acquires lost memories, and finds himself able to change his course of action in critical moments.
It's funny that this whole side of the film is masked in what looks like "Back to the Future," double-billed with "The Time Machine," because it's the scenes with the child actors that give the film any trace of a personal signature from writer/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber.
The pair, who penned the gloriously mean "Final Destination 2," instill the same bitterness and jump-shock mayhem to this deceptively-cold thriller.
Don't look for sophistication, great acting or emotional involvement. Playing by their strengths and not their weaknesses, Bress and Gruber stick close to genre conventions, piling bad vibes on clever scenes for a few good scares. They don't let Kutcher carry the movie; he can't carry this movie and neither can Smart who seems to have parked her acting chops - from the excellent love story "Outside Providence" - next to Kutcher's vehicle from "Dude, Where's My Car?" Instead they do what they do best: kill kids, punk viewers and work that "edge of the seat" cliche like a badly overdone pratfall in some sitcom about Wisconsin in the '70s.
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