Hey, remember The Butterfly Effect? It’s nearly a decade old! We mention this not because we want to make you feel old, but because apparently a decade is long enough to reboot a movie nobody cares about.
The original was essentially Somewhere In Time with the personal tragedy laid on with a trowel. Ashton Kutcher’s character wasn’t just molested, he was forced to star in kiddie porn by Eric Stoltz. He doesn’t just have an abusive father, he has a father who tries to strangle him to death before being killed by guards. It’s a dark movie but at the same time it’s kind of ridiculous, because it wants a PG-13 and frankly Ashton Kutcher just isn’t credible as a human being who’s suffered all this misfortune, and the screenwriters have no sense of the absurd; an alternate ending features the hero traveling back to his birth and aborting himself. Also there’s a scene where he wakes up with no hands which should not be funny, but is:
Anyway, it made $96 million on a $13 million budget, so the original screenwriter and director is back to try and repeat that performance with, we don’t know, Ted from How I Met Your Mother or something.
We’ve got to ask, just how much longer is Hollywood going to keep scraping this barrel? Some remakes kind of make sense, but lately it just seems to be that producers go to the $5 bin, sort through, and choose something to remake. Jacob’s Ladder? Eh, why not, it’s for sale at Best Buy so people have seen it, right? Videodrome? Hey, “Long Live The New Flesh” would make a killer tagline, amirite?
Ah well. At least there are no plans to remake Plan 9 From Outer Space. Oh wait: There are.