The Butterfly Effect 3 2009

 I'm a sucker for time travel stories and without a doubt I would love to be able to do it but probably should never do it since I am the type that would break all the rules of time travel and would be creating one paradox after another until we were all singing caterpillars.  But I told you that so I could tell you this: the first Butterfly Effect movie starring Ashton Kutcher was a great film.  Before I could get a copy of the sequel I heard it was a heaping pile of poo so I gave it a pass.  Then comes The Butterfly Effect 3 and although I haven't read any raving reviews I decided to give it a shot.  Producer Chris Bender and J.C. Spink, who are better known as the production company Benderspink who brought us great movie franchises such as Final Destination, American Pie, The Ring, and The Hangover but are also responsible for The Butterfly Effect franchise.  Now while the first one, as I said, was a huge success this sequel has nothing to do with the original.  No connection to the first story in fact the way in which the time traveling is done is even different.

 The two main characters are Sam Reide (Chris Carmack) a time traveler who helps the police solve cases and his sister Jenna (Rachel Miner) who helps him anchor his body while he travels.  Carmack is serviceable but the better moments come from Miner in this one.  Whenever she is on the screen you can be fairly certain it's going to be (1) a good scene and (2) an important scene to the story and the plot.  Most of the other characters aren't very memorable with the exception of Vicky the bartender played by virtual unknown actress Melissa Jones but she is another stand out for a couple of reasons.  If you see the movie, you'll know what I mean.  The meat of the story comes when the sister of his dead girlfriend comes to talk to Sam and tells him that the man sentenced to the death penalty for killing her sister may be innocent of the crime.  Sam decides to do some investigating for himself and that's when he starts breaking the rules of time travel changing the past and not for the better. 

As is the custom with most time travel stories it is easy to get confused and at times I definitely was here.  For a 90 minute movie this was okay, not as great as the first one (which is the Citizen Kane of the franchise) but I would take a guess and say it is better than the second installment.  I would think instead of a movie franchise perhaps the future of this series could be in a television series.  It would be interesting and perhaps quite easy to keep a series going based on the ideas used in these films.  Hey, if Quantum Leap was able to hang on for  five years then there is definitely a few seasons worth of stories in here somewhere.  Now here's the kicker this movie, to me is about 2 and a half worthy 70 minutes in.  The last 10 minutes got me hook line and sinker and really made me smile as a fan of time travel stories.  So thanks to a curve ball of an ending this pulls out 3 Sounds of Thunder out of 5 (pulled that reference out of left field I did!) and Denise, The Horror Honey was even more impressed and gave it 3.5.  So I was worried that this was going to be the second clunker of the month but we pulled it out at the last minute.  Phew!