The Jacket (2005)
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 159
Fresh: 70 | Rotten: 89
The Jacket is a case of creepy style over substance.
Average Rating: 5.1/10
Critic Reviews: 34
Fresh: 11 | Rotten: 23
The Jacket is a case of creepy style over substance.
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Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 77,912
My Rating
Movie Info
A troubled war veteran tries to unlock his memories of a terrible crime in this stylish thriller, the first American project for British filmmaker John Maybury. In 1991, Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) was an American soldier serving in the Persian Gulf when he was shot in the head; pronounced dead by a field surgeon, Starks somehow returned to life, though with no small number of psychological problems to show for his troubles. A year later, Starks is walking through the snowy Vermont wilderness
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Cast
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Adrien Brody
Jack Starks -
Keira Knightley
Jackie Price -
Kris Kristofferson
Dr. Becker -
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Dr. Lorenson -
Daniel Craig
Mackenzie -
Kelly Lynch
Jean -
Laura Marano
Young Jackie -
Brad Renfro
Stranger -
Mackenzie Phillips
Nurse Harding -
Brendan Coyle
Damon -
Steven Mackintosh
Dr. Hopkins -
Jason Lewis
Police Officer -
Jonah Lotan
Intern
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All Critics (168) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (72) | Rotten (94) | DVD (28)
The acting is uniformly excellent.
Top CriticIt just bounces Brody back and forth in time and yanks us around, and around, and around.
The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of Jacob's Ladder, The Silence of the Lambs and Memento.
Here, Maybury is just arty for art's sake, filming entire scenes in close-ups so big that viewers leave the theater knowing way more than they ever wanted to about the lead actors' bridgework.
Pic begins as a potentially intriguing study of the depersonalizing effects of warfare, only to end up a pastiche of time-travel and psycho-ward movie cliches.
It suffers from a common thriller syndrome these days: the desire to explain away madness with logic.
There's something about The Jacket which doesn't quite fit, but it plays like an intriguing, winter-y mix of Twelve Monkeys, The Butterfly Effect and The Lawnmower Man.
Smart thriller is for mature older teens only.
Maybury is an artist in addition to a director and it's clear that he has an eye for colour, which he uses cleverly to reinforce emotion.
A morose and bleached-looking affair, with depressing music by Brian Eno to match.
There's nothing wrong with a little vicarious experience when you go to the movies, but the director seems to think that his supernatural psycho thriller has to drive you crazy, just to get what it's like to be really insane.
There's nothing wrong with a little vicarious experience when you go to the movies, but the director seems to think that his supernatural psycho thriller has to drive you crazy, just to get what it's like to be really insane.
A solid attempt to wrestle with some big questions. The cast is exemplary and the premise and script are well reasoned and artful. But it doesn't quite come together.
Tadjenin seems to draw inspiration from two books: "10 ways to copy 12 Monkeys" --a far inferior read to "10 ways to write 12 Monkeys"-- and "Common Sense: A Stranger"
As incoherent as it is enjoyable, The Jacket hits the marks that it set out to, yet leaves the audience a bit cold with its squeaky clean ending.
The only real scares here take place as images in Brody's head when he hallucinates under Dr. Becker's treatment. The rest of the film has a somewhat sappy quality to it and doesn't deliver any suspense or thrills of any kind.
film whose quality defies its script
Audience Reviews for The Jacket
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Jack Starks: Sometimes life can only really begin with the knowledge of death.
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- Jack Starks: Sometimes I think we live through things only to be able to say that it happened.
Discussion Forum
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