'Jacket': Mind-bending plot trips over frequent loose ends

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When a movie takes a leap into sci-fi fantasy, it needs to establish some ground rules to help us make that leap along with it.

In "The Time Machine," Rod Taylor and Guy Pearce (in the terrible remake) invented the shiny gizmo that let them zip across the centuries. "The Matrix" spelled out the hows and whys as its heroes bopped between two versions of "reality."

Warner Independent Pictures

'The Jacket'

The verdict: A confused sci-fi romantic-thriller that stumbles on its own gimmick.

Director: John Maybury
Starring: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley
Run time: 102 minutes
Release date: March 4, 2005
Rating: R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.
See showtimes

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
-- Trailers require Quicktime

Now, take a movie like "The Jacket." Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, a mental patient who gets slammed inside a morgue-like locker for "treatment," and while inside discovers he can leap 14 years into the future, then back again.

Why? Because the screenplay says he can. It's like last year's "The Butterfly Effect," where Ashton Kutcher warped reality just by reading his old journals, or 1980's "Somewhere in Time," with a love-smitten Christopher Reeve mentally willing himself into the past.

Even if you take a "why-ask-why" approach toward this belief-suspension gimmick, "The Jacket" is too littered with loose ends and "huh?" moments to work as the edgy sci-fi thriller-romance it wants to be.

In 1993, Gulf War vet Jack is hitchhiking along a snowy road when he meets a little girl named Jackie (Laura Marano) and her strung-out mom, whose truck has died. Jack fixes the engine, gives the little girl his dog tags as a souvenir — then isn't even offered a lift by her mother.

Instead, he's picked up by a drifter who gets pulled over by a policeman and promptly shoots the officer. Jack is also wounded in the incident. When he comes to, the drifter has vamoosed and Jack is charged with the murder.

Unfortunately, nobody can locate Jackie and her mom to corroborate his story. Jack himself is unclear what exactly happened during the shooting. He's tried, found guilty and sent to an asylum for the criminally insane.

That leaves him in the hands of the brutal hospital director, Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), whose idea of therapy is to straitjacket Jack (thus the title), shove him in that drawer, and jump-start the movie's time-travel gimmick.

Wouldn't you know, when Jack finds himself in 2007, the first person he meets is a sketchy alcoholic named Jackie (Keira Knightley), who happens to own a — well, would you guess a set of dog tags?

The movie becomes a race against the clock as Jack learns in 2007 that back in 1993 he's scheduled to be killed by a blow to the head in just a handful of days. Zapping back and forth between time frames, he has to figure out how he dies, and try to keep it from happening.

This complicated plot has potential as an interesting mind-bender. The problem is, it's constantly torpedoed by head-slapping lapses in logic and believability that have nothing to do with the time-traveling.

Take, for instance, Jack's ability to simply wander out of the institution with no opposition. Or consider the two visitors who are allowed to wander unsupervised among inmates in a hospital for the criminally insane. Or even better, the scene when a doctor drives a patient-convict out of the supposedly secure facility, then lets him go alone into a house to chat with a young girl — even though he's a convicted murderer.

Oy.

For better or worse, Brody brings intense conviction to the movie. Knightley works a believable American accent, though like some others onscreen, she's sometimes directed to overact. Jennifer Jason Leigh resists the temptation in the role of a sympathetic doctor.

John Maybury ("Love Is the Devil") directs it all in a self-consciously bleak, frenetic, look-at-me style designed to distract us from the script's flaws. He's not fooling anybody.