Movie Reviews for The Jacket

The Jacket

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Movie Reviews of The Jacket

Movie Review: Pleasant, if minor, surprise.
Summary: 3 Stars

The Jacket (John Maybury, 2005)

For some reason, watching the trailers for this movie way back when, I'd gotten it into my head that this was a true story about psychological torture during the 1991 Iraq war. So you can imagine I was slightly thrown by this one. For the most part, it was a pleasant surprise. (Though I'm now wondering where on earth I got that idea in the first place.)

Jack Starks (The Pianist's Adrien Brody) is a Gulf War veteran trying to get home. His first encounter on the road is with a mother and daughter whose car has broken down; his second is with a hyped-up kid. Sometime during the second encounter, he loses consciousness, and we see a disjointed account of the next batch of time; it ends up with Starks confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, where Thomas Becker (Blade's Kris Kristofferson) is trying a radical new treatment on dangerous patients involving a straitjacket, a cocktail of psychoactive drugs, and a morgue drawer. Starks' reaction to the treatment is, to say the least, different; if you haven't heard anything about it, I won't spoil it for you.

The Jacket's opening half hour reminded me, in all the wrong ways, of the opening half-hour of Pitch Black; it's confusing, disjointed, and looks like a first film. Maybury has even less of an excuse than Twohy, having been directing for well over a decade at this point. Once we actually get into the story, however, and some of the confusing things about Starks' treatment regimen are made clear, the movie improves tremendously (again, like Pitch Black). Even the acting gets better: Brody transforms from a guy who was obviously hired because of his ability to whine, which has been on display in far too many films, to the guy who won an Oscar for The Pianist. Keira Knightley gets a role she can sink her teeth into, and does it quite well. The rest of the cast, which is no small potatoes (Road to Perdition's Daniel Craig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, an all too brief appearance by MacKenzie Phillips, Brad Renfro, etc.), also perform up to standard.

The one thing you're liable to get your teeth into, if you're a nitpicker, is that the movie flaunts all conventions of time. And there's certainly an argument to be made that Massy Tadjedin's screenplay is cavalier (to say the least) on the subject. That said, if you're willing to overlook the inconsistencies as unimportant to the plot device, you're likely to enjoy the movie a whole lot more. In fact, if you can convince yourself that Tadjedin is proposing a whole new theory of time, you're likely to enjoy it quite a bit. If you strip out the odder aspects of the film, it's a nicely-done mystery flick with a number of good performances. ***

Movie Review: A Bridge Too Far...
Summary: 3 Stars

I have struggled a great deal with how to rate The Jacket. It is a film that comes just close enough to high-quality to make you wonder why it didn't come a lot closer. It reminds me of the little engine that tries so hard but ultimately, in this case, fails to breach the crest of that final hilltop. It is definitely full of - albeit sporadic - talent and intrigue. But even under moderate scrutiny, the seemingly minor structural flaws begin to quickly unravel, and leave it just a bit too barren to bear.
Adrien Brody is essentially an easy and brilliant casting move for nearly any role. And in The Jacket he certainly brings his pale, willowy pathos and deceptively seductive quirk to the role of Jack Starks. He owns the part as well as, I suppose, the part allows him to. His counter-part, played by Kiera Knightley, however seems an almost embarrassing mistake, cast as a fairly destitute, slightly alcoholic "white-trash" heroine. Her faltering and laughably husky American accent, coupled with a very thin veil of emotional broad-strokes leaves simply too much for want. I can almost imagine her watching a few episodes of Jerry Springer for inspiration... Kris Kristofferson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, on the other hand, both quietly steal half the scenes, and are both commendable character actors that, unlike Knightley, at least don't over-act their roles.
The real issue that I had with the film, though, lies not in the acting, but in the story itself. As a die-hard fan of films like Memento, I am never one to shy away from (and conversely will often gravitate towards) plots with wildly non-linear structure. So, as I call The Jacket a 'scattered effort', I am not referring to the time-line leap-frogging that occurs. It felt as though the writer was, to begin with, very unsure of what story he/she really wanted to tell - what was the point? To their credit, the film is actually packed with very real and accessible emotions, and with Brody spearheading the project, I certainly found myself swept-up in the sentimental elements at times. But where the film bulges with empathy, it feels deflated and falls drastically short on technical dexterity. I can't fathom that the writer had much, if any, background or researched knowledge of mental illness, psychiatric institutions/medication, and most of all theoretical time-travel philosophies. The scenes in the hospital are so 2-dimmensional and clich?, that - if not for a rather brilliant performance by Daniel Craig (who may very well prove himself to be among the next wave of Phillip Seymore Hoffman-esque character actors) - the scenes could almost just as well have been cut in half; nobody needs to see any more gruff, abusive male nurses who get their's in the end. The idea of the particular brand of therapy given to Brody's character - pumping him full of anti-convulsive/psychotic sedatives like Attivan, binding him up in one of the most draconian and antiquated strait jackets I've ever seen, and throwing him in a morgue drawer, as a method for solving schizophrenia and amnesia is...well, just a little goofy - at least to be taking place in the 90's. Had the story been set during the time when this fictional treatment was (within the movie) invented, the 70's, it could be marginally believable.
The time travel notion seems more a gimmick bandwagon that a desperate writer hopped on, intending to instill an otherwise luke-warm story with edge. Sure, any plot dealing in time travel is based on fantasy - but it would be nice to think that the writer had at least cracked a single book on quantum mechanics before attempting this sci-fi task. Even in my most whimsical and innocent state, I just cannot entertain the possibility that taking Attivan, wearing a strait jacket, and going to sleep in a morgue is going to propel someone 14 years into the future. It reminds me of that older Christopher Reeve movie, "Somewhere in Time" where he performs the lofty deed simply through self-hypnosis.
So Jack Starks dies, at first during the Gulf War, but somehow then revives after several minutes and is shipped back home with a Swiss-cheese memory. As he meanders down a road one day, he helps a mother and daughter whose car is broken down. Then, later, he gets a ride from a not-so ethical Brad Renfroe, who is soon pulled over for speeding, kills the cop, and leaves Jack unconscious on the side of the road, to take the wrap. Since Jack has no real memory, he can't defend himself in court, so he is sentenced to a mental institution. Then there's the typical psych-ward fare, and when Jack finally received his morgue treatment, he finds himself in the future, and meets that little girl (Knightley) all grown up. Weirdness ensues, he bounces back and forth a few times between his life in the ward and the future with Knightley, all while trying to solve the mystery of his own imminent death. He saves himself in the end, by entering the drawer once more after slipping on ice cracking his head open on the ground (that's the mystery solved - no conspiracy, just bad footing), and is catapulted into a future that he has made brighter for himself and Kiera Knightley's character. And of course, they managed to squeeze in a love-affair during his little temporal jaunts, which he ultimately returns to in the end, somehow escaping the prior dynamic of having to return to his original time after only a few hours. This time, because he has died in the "past", I suppose he's free to live in the future. How nice.
But all of that aside, still, I could have really liked this movie if not for the rather short attention span the writer exhibited in failing to develop some kind of focused trajectory for the characters. One minute their awash in tear-filled emotion, the next it seems like ADD has kicked in on the writers' part, and we're watching fluff thrown in for time filler, with scenes that just don't move the story forward. I understand that they are attempts to show the individual characters' depth, but mostly it fails.
The Jacket has been making the rounds on HBO this month, so I've given it three full tries, just to make sure there wasn't some scene or element I had missed that would somehow galvanize this sloppy tale. But it simply tries to be a little cleverer than it is. It's not a `bad' movie - it's just too full of good actors, and good ideas, to be so ineffectual and disjointed. But I say give it a fair shot and see what you think.

Movie Review: You wanna come back.
Summary: 5 Stars

"When you die, theres only one thing you want to happen. You wanna come back."- Jack Starks

Wow. Thats all I have to say about this movie. I saw Adrien Brody in King Kong and I fell in love with him. Afterwards I had to check out all of his movies. I did a search on Amazon for Adrien Brody movies and this was one of the ones that came up. I just had to check it out! Not only was Adrien in it, but my favorite actress ever, the lovely Keira Knightly was in it too. And let me tell you, this movie does not disappoint. The all-star cast lead by Brody and Knightly makes this movie one that you will never forget. It has everything that you could ever ask for; drama, suspense, romance, and even a little bit of comedy.

It tells the story of a Gulf War Veteran named Jack Starks who is wrongly accused of murder. Jack is sent to a mental institution where the doctors drug him up and put him into "The Jacket". While Jack is in "The Jacket" he travels to the future (2007) where he meets Keira's character, Jackie, who he had originally met on the day that he supposedly murdered a man. Jackie tells him that Jack Starks has died and thus begins Jack's search to find out how.

This movie does not disappoint. You will definately love it!

Movie Review: Incredible
Summary: 5 Stars

As most other reviews have said this movie is exelent. One more thing to throw at you, watch the deleted scenes. There are four alternate endings, the only thing that changes is the very last second of the movie, but each give the movie a completly different meaning. Crazy.