- Title: The Jacket
- IMDb: link
I’ve tried to like The Jacket, but, despite the film starring one of my favorite actresses, I’ve never been been sold on its unusual premise which I’m not sure even screenwriter Massy Tadjedin complete understands.
The 2005 thriller stars Adrien Brody as a soldier with brain injuries convicted of a crime we’re pretty sure he didn’t commit and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he becomes the latest criminal inmate to be experimented on by unscrupulous doctor (Kris Kristofferson). Shot full of drugs, strapped into a straightjacket, and put in a morgue drawer Jack Starks (Brody) begins to time travel to the 15 years into the future.
Keira Knightley stars as Jackie, the women Starks meets in the future, who it turns out is also the young girl (Laura Marano) he befriended the day his life went to hell. The film bounces between Starks in the hospital where he attempts to make sense of what is happening to him with the help of a sympathetic doctor (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and his future with Jackie who, after some convincing, begins to believe his outlandish story and research what happened to him in the hospital all those years ago.
Neither Knightley nor Brody are the problem here. The pair work as a couple (even if it is a bit bizarre how quickly a romance develops between them, and a bit creepy given how they met). The concept has some intriguing pieces, even if it has no intention of ever attempting to explain how any of this works, but the film never really puts it all together into a coherent engaging whole.
