The Jacket | Review

Maybury merges Cuckoo’s Nest with puzzling mind-travel frontiers.

Digging into the tired genre of forensic time-travels, Brit helmer John Maybury’s takes on the solider gone mentally AWOL which will please those who can’t get enough of kitschy opening inter-title sequence in Se7en. Passing itself as an amalgamation of several genres, The Jacket is an undetailed exploration of memory-loss and traumatic experience suppression, unfortunately, like the protagonist’s own brushes with death – the plotline pronounces itself dead in the both the creativity and logic departments.

The film’s first 20 minutes is loaded with so much narrative ammo – commencing with Bush Sr.’s war in 91’, a G.I gets a chunk of his head blown-off (unfortunately, we never get to see what kind of titanium plate is used to fit the mole) and then the tale flash-forwards to two perplexing encounters in the not-so friendly state of Vermont? Judged criminally insane – Jack Starks (Adrien Brody – The Village) is subjected to some intense therapy sessions that produce some mind-boggling moments which are visually assessed by the director with super-impositions galore. Massy Tadjedin’s screenplay flushes the film down into psychiatric ward clichés and a bizarre plot time-travel mechanism that carries a pedophiliac connotation when Starks meets the overly jaded-character played by Keira Knightley (Domino). Starks will ultimately change her fate one day by reminding the mom (Kelly Lynch – Drugstore Cowboy) that if she would only call her daughter “petal” that not only will she no longer have a serious booze affliction, but she’ll drive a flashy new VW beetle instead of a used pick-up truck.

Brody’s performance is limited to giving plenty of confused, walking around with the biggest brain hemorrhage strained looks and close-up shots of quick eye-batting facial gestures. The remainder of the cast performances is kept to bare minimum brief speaking parts – we never find out why patients got a special, unorthodox treatment and the film never explains the relation between the jacket, the encumbering space and a medical condition that helps the protagonist skip decades in a heart beat.

The film’s biggest disappointment is the sequences that deal with the straight-jacket/ morgue drawer combo. Rather than revert to stylish eye-candy, the visual strategy could have brought out the notion of fear to nail-biting degree. The claustrophobic body armor and locker could have better dealt with the afflictions of violence – and the stress it causes. Ultimately, The Jacket is a film that tries on one too many hats and rather than delve into post-combat stress with panache, it settles on editing techniques to thrash the film both forwards and backwards.

Rating 1 stars