After The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Butterfly Effect, I was undeniably interested when I read the plot of The Jacket. Bizarre and complicated, the film is a psychological thriller that stars Adrien Brody (Remember The Pianist) and Keira Knightley (From Bend It Like Beckam).
The film opens to a scene at the Gulf war, where the main protagonist Jack Starks is pronounced dead after a shooting. He miraculously comes to life, and soon finds himself in a psychiatric ward. He has supposedly killed a cop, and his amnesia is attributed to mental disorder.
At the hospital, Jack becomes part of an experiment, where he is drugged, jacketted, and put into a box for hours. In the darkness, Jack battles with the demons of his past, and voila..the future!
From being a thriller set in a mental ward, the film suddenly begins exploring the possibility of time travel. Jack Starks finds himself in 2007, where he meets a messed up Jackie. Only, she isn’t just any other girl in the vicinity. Jack first met her in 1992, just before he arrest. Also, in 2007, Jackie tells him that Jack Starks died in 1993, at the mental hospital.
Back in the real world, Jack decides to investigate his own death. But he can only do it back in the box, where he time travels. With Jackie’s help, they visit doctors from Jack’s present . His death cannot be prevented, but before he dies, he makes a huge change in Jackie’s life, altering her future.
The plot is interesting and weird, but if you’re interested in time travel, I’d rather recommend The Butterfly Effect (despite Ashton Kutcher). But unlike Kutcher’s film, this film forces you to think about what you’d do differently, if you knew you were about to die. Would you alter the lives(for the better) of those you loved, and find answers for others who deserved to know the truth? That is what Jack did.
Produced by Peter Guber, George Clooney, and Steven Soderbergh, and directed by John Maybury, the film’s only saving grace is perhaps Adrien Brody. He is brilliant, as a man lost in his delusions, and caught up in a phenomenon he doesn’t understand too well. He emotes with his eyes, displaying naked vulnerability, cynicism, love, and anger.
See it if you have nothing better to do!