ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies.

THE JACKET is a film that defies easy description. A mixture of love story, time-travel fantasy, murder mystery and B-movie shocker, it explodes in countless different directions like a catherine wheel.

The result is often interesting but still leaves you scratching your head trying to make sense of it all. Scotland plays a large part in the story, although mostly as a location. West Lothian was used to pass as a wintry Vermont, and thanks to the miracles of modern filmmaking, the effect is seamless.

Cadaverous Oscar-winner Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, a Gulf War veteran who was shot in the head whilst fighting in Iraq in 1991. A year later, he is hitchhiking in Vermont when he meets Jean (Kelly Lynch) and her young daughter Jackie (Laura Marano).

He is given a lift by a young stranger who subsequently shoots dead a policeman and frames Jack for the murder. Jack is then sent to Alpine Grove asylum and subject to a radical experiment involving incarceration in a straitjacket.
  
Once in the jacket, he seems able to travel through time. In 2007, he meets the adult Jackie (Keira Knightley) and discovers that there are only days to go until his death in 1993.

Top heavy with an elaborate plot, The Jacket spends so long telling the story that it never quite manages to build credibility or to engage you emotionally. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind showed how this kind of complex, multi-layered narrative could work, but The Jacket just doesn’t succeed in pulling it off.
  
THE JACKET
General release, cinemas nationwide
Director: John Maybury
Stars: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason
Leigh, Daniel Craig
Screenwriter: Massy Tadjedin
Certificate: 15
Running time: 102 mins
Country: USA
Year: 2004
 

© Allan Hunter, 2005