2004 Ashton Kutcher movie
Rating: 10/20
Plot: A college kid who experienced a lot of blackouts while growing up discovers that he can travel back in time through his journal. He does and messes everything up.
“There’s one major hole in your story.”
Well, there might be a lot of holes in your story, Bress and Gruber. The idea is an intriguing one, so intriguing that it actually makes perfect sense that they’d be remaking the movie ten years after this one came out. And you don’t have to look that up. You can trust me on this one.
Here’s what they’re going to have to fix with this remake:
First, the acting. It’s really bad. Ashton Kutcher is like a big awkward wart on somebody’s thumb. He can’t even eat right in this movie. His best moment is right here:
That’s awesome. It’s one of the many moments in this that aren’t supposed to be funny but wind up making you laugh out loud anyway. I laughed when Lenny, college-aged and chubby, said, “I couldn’t cut the rope.” I laughed when Kutcher said, “Not again!” I laughed at a lot of scenes with William Lee Scott playing young Tommy, a psychopathic child who burns doggies alive and twists the heads off of his sister’s dolls. His funniest moment might have been something that was supposed to be darkly humorous, the scene after he’s squirted lighter fluid all over the sack with that dog in it, hits his sister with a board, and then screams, “Look at what you made me do!” I laughed when Melora Walters, the actress with a really annoying voice who plays Ashton Kutcher’s mother, gets sick in one of the timelines. And I really laughed when Kutcher, using every ounce of acting talent that the good lord gave him, attempts to cry.
Nothing beats that scene with the granola bar though.
The main problem with this movie isn’t the acting, however. It’s that everything is just so obvious, just clumsily obvious. Things are almost comically exaggerated. Kids curse, blow things up, smoke, read Hustler, and even listen to heavy metal music. They aren’t real troubled children with sociopathic tendencies. They’re Hollywood bad kids. In one of the timelines, love-interest Kayleigh winds up living a melancholy existence, but in this type of movie, that just has to consist of her becoming a heavily-scarred and drug-addicted prostitute. There’s suicide, prison rape, pedophilia, dead babies, missing arms, absent fathers, broken granola bars. If you ever want to play Trauma Bingo, this might be the movie you should use.
Oh, and there’s a psychologist who actually tries to explain Kutcher’s behavior with “Maybe he’s upset because he doesn’t have a dad.” Maybe it was the delivery that made that seem so awkward.
You know what else is really awkward here? The attempt to make Ashton Kutcher’s character some sort of Christ figure. Like everything else in this movie, it’s just a little heavy-handed.
Speaking of hands, I think I know why Ashton Kutcher’s hands were gone in one of this movie’s timelines–they were embarrassed after seeing the exploding mailbox special effect. Ba dum chhh!
I think I might hate this movie a little more just because it seems that other people like it. Is that fair?