You’ve got to hand it to a movie brazen enough to kill both animals and babies in bids for audience sympathy. The Butterfly Effect – in which Ashton Kutcher plays a student who can return to his childhood, alter an event and then awaken to a new
future – relies on beatings, infanticide, the murder of a pet and a dollop of child pornography for drama, a shameless strategy that gives an otherwise clever thriller an exceedingly unpleasant aftertaste.
