The Jacket marries the elements of time travel in films such as Donnie Darko and 12 Monkeys with the gritty, morbid, melancholy atmosphere of Jacob’s Ladder, into a decent enough production which will entertain for those sick to death of remakes, updates, and sequels.
Jack is the in first Gulf War, shot in the head by a civilian in a passive situation, he is presumed dead but miracuously survives the stiff fate. Treated. saved and returned back to the US Jack continues his journey and passes by a drunk mother and her child, with their vehicle out of commission. He converses with the daughter, Jackie, who takes an immediate liking to Jack and develops a strange affinity. After getting the vehicle started, and with the mother spewing and sputing violence in his direction he continues along to hitch a ride with a man who commits a crime, for which Jack becomes accused and committed for being criminally insane.
This is where the film starts properly, and almost immediately we are introduced to the star of the show, the straight jacket. Although this is no ordinary straight jacket, being covered in the sweats of it’s occupiers, and sportinga rather putrid yellow colour around the nether regions. Cleanliness is certainly not next to Godliness in this instance.
When Jack is placed into the jacket, pumped full of drugs and thrown into the morgue, he goes througha psychotropic journey which allows him to travel back and forth in time, allowing him to relive previous events but also finding that he can influence the past by learning from the future. This is important, since he discovers in the future that he dies several days after going to the asylum in the past.
There’s an obvious angle on why he meets the young girl Jackie and her mother in the past, as they will play a part in the future, or the past, in particularly the elder version of Jackie, played by Keira Knightly. Naturally there develops a weird sexual and romantic relationship between the two, and depending on how you look at it, it’s probably OK.
Where The Butterfly Effect failed misreably was in almost every aspect, playing more like a dumbed down film, in order to satisfy the moronic masses who would find it difficult to write a sentence without the aid of Microsoft Word and it’s spell checker. The Jacket does better, particularly on the acting front, with decent performances from Adrian Brody, but especially Keira Knightly, who seems to be the most versatile rising actress in film and growing stronger with every performance.
From somewhere, they’ve managed to dig up the graves of Jennifer Jason Leigh who looks like she spent a few decades longer in the burial grounds than she probably needed, and Kris Kristofferson who’s always looked the same. Except he’s more wrinkly, like a very old Oak tree. The former not only looks dead, but acts dead too, and is the biggest flaw in the film. Jason-Leight doesn’t engage, and instead bores with her plank-like expressions; her acting feels close to method acting a zombie.
Brody can’t be forgiven either, in all honesty. At times his cheesy grin is just far too unconvincing to believe, and his moments of panic make you laugh loud rather than sympathise with his traumatic treatment. The watchdogs of hell at the hospital treat him with the sort of contempt reserved for a child molestor, and do so brilliantly. You despise them, and loathe them for their treatment. Brody, on the other hand, seems like he’s faking the hatred and fear of the treatment, that at any moment he will crack up in laughter and not get a chance on teh ride.
There are a few loopholes, but this is simply the norm for films these days, particularly ones which try to emphasise more smart arseness than the previous efforts, and when dealing with issues of time travel. These can be forgiven, however, as there seems to have been a concerted effort to make things work, rather than half-arsedly throwing the thing together. Direction is tight for the most part, but the pace is often far too quick for any realism to develop – scenes that spring to mind include the romance between Jackie and Jack which is almost instantaneous after his second meeting with her in the future. You could apply some logic to it, but it’s still more than a little implausible given the situation the two are in.
The Jacket is actually a decent film that tries to offer a little (not much though) freshness to films that are currently going for the throat with psychological/ghost/horror thrillers till the cows come home, and beyond. The film isn’t particularly original, and it’s fair to say that only Keira Knightly really offers a likeable performance, but the rest of the perforances aren’t so bad to ruin the film and make this one worth a rent.
Verdict: One decent performance, a modicum of freshness, a rentable time travel thriller