The Butterfly Effect

Directed by J. MacKye Gruber and Eric Bress

Starring Ashton Kutcher Amy Smart

New Line

113 mins.

Rated R

Grade: B

Here’s what’s offered up for entertainment in “The Butterfly Effect:” kiddie porn, a woman and baby blown to bits by dynamite, a dog being burned alive and a child sociopath being stabbed in the back with a shard of metal. It’s not exactly the most pleasant way to spend an evening at the movies, but the film has a grim, disorienting power. It’s an intense, unnerving mind-trip nightmare in which Ashton Kutcher – he of the omnipresent trucker hats and pretty-boy smirk – gets involved in the ultimate cosmic “punking.”

“The Butterfly Effect” will probably be better known as the movie in which Kutcher gets all serious. Can Demi Moore’s current boy toy actually act? Let’s just say that the actor doesn’t embarrass himself. Kutcher, wearing a scruffy goatee as if to signify his serious actor intentions, emotes as Evan Treborn, a brainy college psych major with a family history of insanity. His father was locked away in an asylum for claiming he could fix problems in the past; Evan, meanwhile, has a longtime affliction, which is blocking out painful memories from his past. Trying to dig up memories from his past involving his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh’s shady, creepy father, he visits the troubled girl (played, as an adult, by Amy Smart), which leads to her possibly inevitable suicide.

“The Butterfly Effect” stems from that chaos theory concept that states that if a butterfly were to flap its wing in Asia it could cause a hurricane in North America. Evan has kept detailed journals of his life ever since he was seven, when he drew a disturbingly graphic (and strangely artful) picture in class. College-age Evan, meanwhile, discovers that, for reasons left unexplained, when he reads certain entries from his journals he’s catapulted back in time, where he can manipulate events to make things right. As in all such stories, his changes in the past affect lives in the future.

Young Evan tells off Kayleigh’s drunken, pedophile father (a chillingly slimy Eric Stoltz) and wakes up as a frat boy, a sweetly smiling Kayleigh on his arm. Unfortunately, the girl’s twisted, sociopathic brother is now an ex-asylum inmate and a bat-waving loser and a violent altercation leaves Evan facing Aryan neo-Nazi rapists in jail. So it’s back to the future with even worse results.

The rocky road ahead is littered with prison sex, paraplegia, madness and child murderers among other niceties. The writer-directors, J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress (“Final Destination 2”) revel in the cruelties that befall their characters, but the squirmy unpleasantness keeps “The Butterfly Effect” from descending into silliness. The movie sidesteps exploitation so that the perversities come off as sad and tragic rather than as sick and twisted.

Kutcher admirably gives his all, and he acquits himself well enough; unfortunately, he lacks the presence that would push the movie over the top. Faring better is Smart, who’s more often used as blonde window dressing in movies like “Road Trip.” Here she’s asked to go from sweet, bland sorority girl to scarred, cynical junkie/prostitute. She does so with aplomb.

The movie, as absurd as it often sounds, retains a nervy fascination. Too bad it doesn’t exude the power that it could.