[image-4]Published August 07, 2008.
Chaos Theory
(Castle Rock)
Coincidentally, the night before I sat down with Chaos Theory, I watched a Batman: the Animated Series episode featuring a gentleman named Temple Fugate. Much like Frank (Ryan Reynolds), the protagonist in Chaos Theory, Fugate is a time-efficiency expert whose ordered life is thrown into disarray when someone has the audacity to suggest he should abandon his schedule. Following said schedule disruption, Fugate becomes the Clock King, a villain powered by stubbornness and OCD; following his disruption, Frank becomes a hedonistic basket case. But Chaos Theory's an annoying hour-and-five minutes longer than the Clock King episode, and ends with lame moralizing about love being the chaotic heart's stabilizer, instead of a bad-ass face-off with Batman. Reynolds spends most of Chaos Theoryemoting like a champ---he cries, he trashes a motel room, he goes on a murderous rampage, he streaks at a hockey game. He also demonstrates that he can play old guys: The film's framed by a weird storytelling device that shows an older, wiser Frank telling his daughter's husband-to-be (Mike Erwin) the story of his own marriage. But Reynolds needs better material to emote with---watching Chaos Theory is hardly an effective use of anyone's time.
---Lindsay McCarney
