Movie Review

The Jacket

Trippy mental hospital movies can be a lot of fun with the right story and creepy ideas. A perfect example would be Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys,? a film that I felt this movie mirrored almost perfectly in the trailer. "The Jacket" doesn't live up to that movie, however, or the promises of its own trailer. This film, directed by John Maybury, feels like a half-baked nightmare in need of a rewrite. Movies like this don't have to make perfect sense; in fact, the fun of watching them is just how screwy they can make you feel. Just when the only reward the genre can give you is a headache, something went wrong.

The film begins during the Gulf War, filmed in night-vision green, as we meet Jack Starks for the first time. Jack (Adrien Brody) is a soldier during the war who gets shot while trying to help a little kid in harms way. This is the first time Jack has died, we learn, from the narration, and if you have seen any of the television promos for this movie you know that it won't be the last.

The story picks up a year later as Jack is hitchhiking back home. He meets a young girl and her mother stranded on the side of the road with a broken car. He gives them some help, and also gives the young girl, Jackie, his dog tags. Then things take a turn for the worse for Jack, as the driver he hitches a ride with turns out to be a criminal. A cop is killed and Jack is framed for the murder. The court finds Jack delusional, and ends up sending him to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. Jack claims his innocence but it all falls on deaf ears. He is kept heavily medicated and subjected to a cruel treatment by one of the doctors at the hospital named Becker (Kris Kristofferson).

Becker places Jack in a straightjacket and locks him up in a morgue drawer. The treatment ? I?m guessing ? is designed to break Jack down to the point where his medication can help him. The treatment instead sends Jack into the future ? 2007 to be exact, where he meets Jackie (Keira Knightly) again. Jackie is all grown up now and seems to have followed the path of Jack Starks very closely at her young age, informing us that he died in 1993. We now have the obligatory scene in which Jackie doesn't believe this crazy man who claims to be Jack, and she agrees to help Jack find out how he dies.

Maybury gives this film a somber tone with perfect flashes of disturbingly graphic visuals. It's combined very well with a story that uses all the right gimmicks, such as setting it in a mental hospital, the idea of an experimental treatment, and throwing in time travel as a cherry on top. All the elements are there for a decent thriller, but the thrills never come. The story abandons its own plot setup instead, and turns into a moralizing drama about the way one of the characters lives life. The movie is a mystery that consistantly makes us want to know more, then it just totally switches tracks. By the end, it seems like a lot of unneccesary tricks were used to sell a very basic story.

Adrien Brody gives a fantastic performance, though, and I'm guessing he was the reason this movie hit mainstream theaters instead of the sci-fi channel. The Oscar winner squeezes out every ounce of this character's emotional pain perfectly, and completely makes up for his basically useless role in "The Village.? Keira Knightley, who so far has held herself out as the female action hero of the future, also gets to stretch her acting chops a little more here as well. "The Jacket" has ambition but ultimately there are few rewards to be had here. Brody and Knightley are promising young actors, and director Maybury has a lot of talent, but a movie like this just restrains all three.

Craig's Grade: C+

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%