2004, R, 113 minutes

It's frustrating to watch a movie go awry that begins with an intriguing premise. The Butterfly Effect, a time-traveling thriller starring Ashton Kutcher, is one such movie. Writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber create a mind-bender of a plot that crosses back and forth so often that it eventually collapses on itself.

Evan Treborn (Kutcher) is a bright college student still troubled by a highly traumatic childhood. We first see him with his friend Kayleigh as seven-year-olds, as he has a mental blackout during an incident involving sexual abuse at the hands of Kayleigh's father (Eric Stoltz). This kid had it rough. His mental-patient father tried to strangle him, he initiated a prank that blows up a mother and her baby, and he witnessed the murder of his dog by a sadistic kid (and this is all in the first 15 minutes of the film. Whew!).

As a troubled college student, Evan begins reading his childhood journals in an effort to better understand his past. The blackouts he experienced left him with few specific memories of the events, but reading the journal entries written at the time puts him back at each scene. Wanting to save his friend Kayleigh (played as an adult by Amy Smart) from a tragic end, he travels back to the sexual abuse incident to stop Kayleigh's father. He succeeds, and he suddenly wakes up in a whole new reality with Kayleigh. They're popular college students, but this reality leads to Evan committing murder. So he has to go back in time again to keep that series of events from happening. Each new reality (there are several) creates a domino effect to another tragic end for Evan and/or his loved ones.

The Butterfly Effect plays like Groundhog Day crossed with an episode of The Twilight Zone. Evan keeps re-living those childhood traumas, and each of his changes in the past causes something horrible to happen in the future. It's an intriguing idea, but after about a half-dozen or so of these alternate scenarios (around the time Evan wakes up with no arms), the movie reaches the point of self-parody. All of this criss-crossing through time creates a highly unfocused effect, and since each new reality ends with a new horror, it's difficult to become invested in the fates of these characters.

We experience Evan's childhood traumas over and over again throughout the movie. While most of the incidents aren't shown in detail, they're horrifying enough to create a very unpleasant feel for the film. Shouldn't there be horror elements in a thriller such as this? Yes, but using child molestation as a major plot element in a mainstream "popcorn" movie is irresponsible at best, and exploitative at worst.

On the positive side, Kutcher is able to put his Punk'd persona aside and give a credible dramatic performance. Smart is called upon to play radically different versions of the same character (perky cheerleader in one, junkie whore in another), and she does well with the challenging role. The actors playing Evan and Kayleigh at different ages are effectively terrified, and young Jesse James is truly scary as the kid who does the damage to Evan's poor dog (animal lovers, beware).

Today's thrillers often seem to use a gimmick, like The Sixth Sense did so successfully. The Butterfly Effect has a nifty one, but the end result is over-stuffed and dissatisfying. Bress and Gruber earn points in making an ambitious thriller, but the movie is truly all over the map (in more ways than one).