The Jacket

If nothing else, The Jacket kicks off with plenty by way of intrigue. Adrien Brody is shipped home following a near fatal gunshot in 1991 but his post-combat sanity is far from assured. One snowy Vermont moment, he’s assisting a drunk woman (Kelly Lynch) and her little girl at a roadside, then a memory lapse later, he’s being electroshocked by Kris Kristofferson’s sinister shrink after being found guilty of killing a cop.
Our unfortunate hero’s discombobulating experiences are convincingly echoed through the film’s disorientating, paranoid overture, but The Jacket quickly settles into a conventional detective groove. Once Brody finds a convenient way of commuting between 1992 and 2007, he bonds romantically with the little girl he once met (now barely grown into Keira Knightley) and cheats outrageously with temporal distortions. Only Ashton Kutcher in last year’s splendidly silly The Butterfly Effect was allowed more get out of jail free cards for sorting out the future.
Obviously there’s more than a little of Jacob’s Ladder and La Jetee in the set-up, but The Jacket‘s most apparent debt is to David Fincher. As post-Se7en aesthetic goes, The Jacket is far more impressive than most murky wannabes, but anyone who saw the Francis Bacon biopic Love Is The Devil – director Maybury’s crossover from experimental film – may have cause to feel disappointment.
Still, if you’re neither light sensitive nor particularly adverse to plot holes, The Jacket should prove decently thrilling.

Running Time 102mins. Cert 16. Opens May 13th.