Ashton Kutcher plays a boring fool who discovers he has the ability to travel through time. He uses this amazing ability in an attempt to trick out his horrible childhood for better results. But his attempts to make life better for himself is like squeezing a long skinny balloon. Bad stuff changes or worsens, but it never disappears.

If The Butterfly Effect Director's Cut on DVD is less boring than the theatrical version, then the theatrical version must've been truly miserable. The film attempts to be gloomy & serious, but with a cast better suited to any film with "National Lampoon" in the title, it is not possible to take any of it seriously. While there were moments in the convoluted tale that were pretty good, there were more moments that were utterly ridiculous.

Some viewers have found this film thought-provoking, but for anyone who has already read Ray Bradbury or any other science fiction, there was nothing new about any of it, & the main thoughts provoked would regard the methods by which the film might've been saved somewhere along the production schedule, but nobody bothered.

Better actors might've helped "sell" the mediocre script, but it would've taken a way better script to sell these actors.


It's sequel time. Erica "Lois Lane" Durrance plays the girlfriend Julie killed in an accident. Her boyfriend (Eric Lively) has the ability to go back in time to change events & therefore goes back to save her life.

Well, you know what they say, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. I figured the big budget & the annoying cast of the first Butterfly Effect was the real reason it stank, & a low-budget sequel with a cast of nobodies might actually be an improvement.

Well, no. Terrible acting, mediocre script, & a cast once more unappealing pretty much assure it's not any fun.

The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006) might as well have been called Domino Effect. The simpering romantic angle fails because neither the male nor female leads are even slightly sexy, & god forbid they should procreate.

The most we can hope for are a couple intriguing time travel twists to incite ye olde sensa-wunda. Our hero is an office worker at a start-up tech company, a job as boring as himself. A long dull office scene is followed by a long dull nothing-to-do-at-home scene, finally leading to his first time-jump to stop the car accident that killed his girl & two friends. Is any of it slightly interesting? Sure. Very slightly.

But then it reverts to more of the lamest possible relationship stuff while waiting for the Bad Thing to happen. After an interminal period he makes his second journey back in time, this time merely to get himself a better job since his girlfriend rightly thinks he's an effing loser.

Time travel makes him a bigwig in the tech company but he's no longer with his girlfriend; his best friend Trevor (Dustin Milligan) is now in trouble with gangsters; & other story intrusions come in totally from left field.

There's a little filip at the tail end cuter than your average "Boo!" that footnotes so many bad films. But going for cute didn't really save Butterfly Effect 2 form a terminal case of sequilitis.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl