STUDIO: Warner Independent Pictures
STARRING: Ryan Reynolds, Emily Mortimer, Stuart Townsend, Sarah Chalke, and Matreya Fedor
RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2008
DIRECTED BY: Marcos Siega
WRITTEN BY: Daniel Taplitz
GENRE: Comedy/Drama
RATING: PG-13

You won't see many films this year with quite the identity crisis of Chaos Theory. Daniel Taplitz's screenplay tries to walk the fine line between human comedy and heartwrenching drama, a high-wire act that requires a balance of tones that very few directors can pull off. Watch Chaos Theory and you'll understand why so many critics love Alexander Payne - what he does ain't easy. Chaos Theory just never gets the balance right, swinging wildly between comedy and drama, never allowing either to settle into a groove and become effective as a laugher or a human tragedy. Chaos Theory is about a man who writes possibilities on note cards, picking them at random, and the film reflects that haphazard mindset. It feels like the filmmakers wrote "Comedy," "Drama," and "Other" on note cards and then picked none of the above.

Ryan Reynolds stars as Frank Allen, a man we meet intercepting his future son-in-law who’s trying to leave his own wedding. Frank sits the young man with cold feet down and tells him the story of a very bad day in his life, one that supposedly gave him insight into the human dilemma of chaos and planning. Frank was a tightly wound man, one who made lists about everything and scheduled his life to the minute. He even gave speeches on how to be more efficient in your personal life. One day, Frank's wife Susan (the always-lovely Emily Mortimer) moves the clocks in their home ten minutes forward, thinking that it will give her uptight hubbie an extra cushion for the day when, of course, it actually gives him ten minutes less. That little decision leads to a day that unwinds Frank's entire life, including sending him into a possible affair with the movie-stealing Sarah Chalke and uncovering some revelations about his family that threaten to tear his whole life apart. Frank realizes that his planning has left him blind to reality and, as a result, he starts to live life like a third member of The Bucket List, doing whatever the randomly picked notecards tell him to do. Will chaos lead Frank back to normalcy?

For some reason, despite a much higher "miss" to "hit" ratio in his career, I always root for Ryan Reynolds. He's a nice guy with an affable presence on-screen that seems natural and easy-to-watch. But he's overwhelmed in Chaos Theory by an overly complicated screenplay and a director who has no idea how to finesse it into something watchable. The minute Reynolds makes his audience care about Frank’s plight, the film pulls that sense of gravity out from underneath him with goofy, over-the-top comedy. And the minute the laughs feel like they might start coming, the screenwriter tries to pull the heartstrings. Reynolds and Mortimer won't be fazed by this misfire but Chaos Theory certainly lives up to its title. It's a mess.