The Jacket on DVD

Description

When you put on The Jacket, prepare for a head-trip into fragmented reality. Coproducer Steven Soderbergh might have fared better with this mind-bender than British director John Maybury (who indulges an excess of heavy-handed "style"), but it's intriguing enough to hold your attention as Gulf War veteran Jack Starks (Adrian Brody) sustains a head-wound that results in amnesia and fragmented timelines. One involves Jack's apparent killing of a policeman, after which he's institutionalized and subjected to straight-jacketed experiments in sensory isolation (with Kris Kristofferson as the doctor in charge); the other is a possible future involving a nihilistic waitress (Keira Knightley) with connections to his past, and the discovery that Jack will die in four days if he can't solve the brain-teasing puzzle he's fallen into. The Jacket aspires to the cleverness of Memento and falls short of that target, but Brody gives this exercise in desperate disorientation a certain gravitas that keeps you watching as his tormenting visions begin to unravel. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brad Renfro and Kelly Lynch make the most of their small supporting roles.Thriller centering on a military veteran (Adrien Brody) who returns to his native Vermont suffering from bouts of amnesia. When he is accused of murder and lands in an asylum, a well-meaning doctor puts him on a heavy course of experimental drugs, restrains him in a jacket-like device, and locks him away in a body drawer of the basement morgue. The process sends him on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his death in four day's time. Now the only question that matters is: can the woman he meets in the future save him?