Someone should go back in time and replace the worthless Butterfly Effect #2 with this one. Like lots of other viewers I had very low expectations, I was just a fan of the premise. But as soon as the music starts, you have to say to yourself, "Just a minute, there seem to be talented people involved here." The biggest improvement is that the hero is not a mere whiner, he's a guy with determination, he's an altruist, he's a crime-solver. That said, the actor playing him suffers from the disadvantage of a fashion-mannequin face.
As sometimes happens as a premise becomes more and more familiar to the audience, it becomes more and more commonplace in the fictional world as well. (How many people turn out to have survived the destruction of Krypton by now?) So in this movie there is an old master time-jumper who presumably has any number of disciples by now. I think a movie is stronger when the hero is alone with his superpower, but I suppose it's impossible to make a lot of such sequels with different heroes.
Others have remarked that the sex scene jumps overboard from the movie; I'd like to add that if you're keeping track of the script, you realize that the scene is important to the plot but that it is supposed to be over with very quickly; the way it goes on and on may have added commercial value but it turns a bit of the movie into nonsense.
Aside from that, thank goodness, the plot does hang together and does carry us along, the ending is solid if not entirely unpredictable, and although time-jumping seems to have become not only more commonplace but much easier than in the first film, the portrayal of a person's struggle to alter the ostensibly inevitable, and the consequences of that struggle, makes #3 a legitimate contribution to the franchise, and I'd say quite a favorable contribution. These guys are good.
