Ashton Kutcher, the guy who plays the idiot with the big grin in Fox''s "That 70''s Show," and whose biggest movie to date
is
Dude, Where''s My Car?, plays what will probably be his most serious role ever in a movie that is surprisingly dark and surprisingly gripping.
The Butterfly Effect is an interesting and shocking take on time travel, to say the least.
In a few respects, The Butterfly Effect starts out like many Stephen King stories, where a group of four children become inexplicitly linked by a series of troubling and sometimes tragic events that will haunt them and change them for the rest of their lives. The difference is that The Butterfly Effect examines what would happen if you could go back and change the events of the past so that they wouldn''t be a burden later on in life. Of course, as with all time travel movies of this type, changes in the past always make things worse in the future.
Kutcher does a surprisingly decent job in the lead, as a young man just wanting to make things good for everyone. He does the serious thing pretty well, although there are a few parts where his comic talents come into play, and I''m not sure if they were always intentional. Still, the biggest problem I had with him was the way he ran down a hallway near the end of the movie (like a psychotic bird, if there is such a thing), so that says it all. Though I am quite certain that Kutcher will drift back into the comedy genre as he seems most comfortable there, this movie proves that he does have the capability to do dark and serious films.