Just when you thought that Ashton Kutcher’s double box office whammy a few weeks back had punked American movie audiences, New Line cinema offers a sequel to Mr. Demi Moore’s 2004 sleeper hit The Butterfly Effect. Now look, it’s easy to poke fun at Kutcher - the guys’ whole career is built on an apparent desire to look as daft as possible. But his original production is heads and tails above this blatant rip-off.

Like New Line’s recent addition to the I Know What You Did Last Summer pantheon, The Butterfly Effect 2 is a virtual re-make of the original film. In this incarnation The L Word’s very own Eric Lively stars as a young businessman whose whole world is shattered when his girlfriend and two best friends perish in a horrific car crash. After a year of pure torture, Lively discovers his ability to alter the past. Unfortunately, changing one brief moment in time sets off a shockwave of reverberations for everyone involved. Been there done that.

The cast and crew don’t have much gray area to work with here, assuming they’ve seen the first movie. In fact, part 2 plays out like a first year film school version of lather, rinse, repeat. Lively is passable in a role that asks little more than miming brain crushing headaches and squinting his eyes. Erica Durance (TV’s Smallville) who plays girlfriend Julie hardly fairs better as her biggest character arc is getting pissed off and changing her hair color. The cast is rounded out with Gina Holden (Final Destination 3) and Dustin Milligan (Slither) who later participates in a decidedly left field death sequence, which added an uneasy and violent curb to one possible future. None of the alternate realities presented in the film ever come close to being as effective as the Amy Smart drug addiction segment of the original film. Perhaps that is the biggest failure of this movie – a total lack of emotional depth in favor of, or against, the characters.

Director John R. Leonetti, who shot Mortal Kombat Annihilation for New Line back in 1997, turns in an adequate, if unremarkable, job imagining the script provided by Michael D. Weiss who – not surprisingly – also penned I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. It seems that Weiss’ stock and trade is going to be poorly constructed sequels to better performing genre pieces.

I’m not sure that the original Butterfly Effect was ripe for sequel territory. Sure it was a fun little film, with a bit of an edge, and some solid supporting turns from its cast, but the concept had run its course when the closing credits scrolled the first time. As far as the team behind The Butterfly Effect 2 is concerned - it’s not their fault that this film got made - they might have done the best they could with what they had. Unfortunately what they had was a bunch of Studio Execs strip-mining their back catalogue, desperate to find another hit, but only managing to score a shallow “Lifetime movie” version of the original picture.