What is it about films and Chaos theory? Everyone from David Thewlis in Naked to Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park has expounded on the theme in their best faux-analytical tones. What’s the deal? I mean you never hear Josh Hartnett launching into a rant about the Superstring hypothesis, or Tara Reid reciting pi to a hundred places, or Brittany Murphy quoting liberally from Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Yet you can hardly move for all the idiot-friendly movie references to the Butterfly Effect. Now (hushed, awed silence please, and you may like to add your own dramatic drum-roll – it’s entirely your call) – Ashton Kutcher – current himbotic paramour to Demi – is lending his weighty scientific clout to the issue, and sure enough, the opening credits of this psychological horror trumpet that old chaotic cliché about a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon elsewhere.
Accordingly, The Butterfly Effect’s reasonably intriguing premise has the simian one travelling through time (via diary entries – don’t ask…) in order to sort through his various repressed childhood traumas. This begs three important questions – how has a man whose knuckles visibly drag along the ground mastered the space-time continuum? Why hasn’t he learned the valuable lessons offered by The Simpsons’ Halloween Specials? And more perplexing still, how come he couldn’t just go to a psychotherapist? I believe they have quite a few practising Stateside.
Anyways, before you can shout, ‘Don’t fuck with the past or it’ll have a devastating impact on the present’, Mr. Kutcher has done just that, visiting all manner of dire apocalyptic consequences upon his nearest and dearest. Not that they weren’t all tormented in the first place, for it quickly transpires that there were several terrific reasons why our protagonist suffered vast gaps in his memory. What with the childhood porno appearance, the preposterously cruel father-figure (Stoltz – ‘Watch out! He’s ginger!’) and the pet puppy that went on fire, Ashton is soon wishing he had left his Pandora’s Box of inner demons well alone, and maintained a stiff upper lip. Perhaps he’ll know for next time, but these things will happen in relentlessly nasty fare such as this.
Don’t get me wrong, The Butterfly Effect is far from being devoid of trashy B-flick charm (Aston’s aping is endearing and there’s plenty of lip-trembling histrionics) but it’s uncompromisingly tragi-ludicrous in a very 8mm kind of way. You really have to think that our heavy-browed hero could have found a more tasteful way to capitalise on all those appearances in the National Enquirer. Of course, its still a vast step-up from the psychedelically awful Dude, Where’s My Car? or the risible Just Married. Now, if only someone could go back in time and change those and to hell with the consequences.

114mins. Cert 18. Opens April 16