[image-4]Published August 07, 2008.
Chaos Theory
Directed by: Marcos Siega
(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
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2008.