The Jacket

Rating R Genre thriller Starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kelly Lynch Directed by John Maybury Publisher Warner Independent Pictures External Links The Jacket

Beginning with pixilated images of war in the year 1991, The Jacket is being marketed as a horror film- hence the less than compelling tagline "Terror Has A New Name." It's an old marketing trick. When you can't define a specific demographic for your advertising, just create one. There are elements of horror present in The Jacket, but there are also elements present from a lot of different films. The war imagery and delusional state of the main character suggests The Manchurian Candidate, the entrapment in an insane asylum Gothika, the general theme of paranoia and some of the camera work, Frankenheimer's excellent Seconds. There are two other movies that The Jacket closely resembles and it's probably not telling you too much to say that one of those is Jacob's Ladder. But if I told you the other film, the one it resembles most closely of all then you'd know the ending and in this case many viewers may feel that the ending is really the lion's share of what the movie has to offer.

Jack Starks, an injured war vet travels back to Vermont, but has an accident while hitchhiking. Waking up to find himself charged with murder, he is sent to an asylum for the criminally insane where he is subjected to experimental drugs, periodically restrained in a large jacket like device and locked inside of a morgue drawer. Suddenly, he finds himself projected into the past and future where he discovers that he will die in four days time. Is it all in his head? Or is he really on a journey through space and time able to choose his own destiny?

It's a conceit of movies to allow us to see the world through their characters eyes. It generates empathy. When the character's sanity is in question, it's also a good way of throwing the audience off base. Unfortunately in The Jacket, we're offered a story that never really generates much more frisson than a middling episode of The Twilight Zone. Jack Starks isn't an everyman, he's a movie-man, a character, a type and though Adrien Brody tries gamely, the rest of the movie just won't let us care that much about him. Keira Knightley is also very good in her role cast against type as a trashy cynical burnout, but it seems all an artifice to give Jack Starks a love interest.

The movie does play nicely with the idea of time travel making some of Jack's future predictions the result of having talked to people in the future. It's as if we are let in on the helplessness he feels. He knows what will happen, but the best he is able to do with the information is produce a small effect not unlike a parlor trick for the person he's talking too. In the end we sense way too early on that we are being led by the screenplay to an ending we've seen before, that makes a point we've heard before, in a way that's been done too many times before.