The Jacket Reviews
Top Critic
The acting is uniformly excellent.
It 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.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Maybury tricks everything up with a hyperkinetic directing style that relies heavily on constant flashes, trippy quick cuts, icily bleached-out colors and frequent, odd close-ups of everyone's dental work.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
A somber piece of intellectually challenging entertainment.
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| Original Score: 4/5
A sci-fi fantasy with an unusual bit of gravity and style.
The characters in the tepid sci-fi thriller The Jacket, starring Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley, are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
I enjoyed the electroshock ambience, and accepted the ride as a jumped-up sci-fi mystery.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Even the viewer who finds the premise too far-fetched to accept may nonetheless come away impressed with the ambitiousness of the attempt and even be moved by the emotional effect of the film's well-staged concluding sequence.
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| Original Score: 3/5
At times it seems like a daring mindbender. At other times, it just seems unintentionally absurd.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Apparently, there's a lot less to this picture than meets the eye.
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| Original Score: 2/4
If you can buy the entire psychic flying about and enjoy a bit of sick torture, The Jacket is a lot of fun -- fast, frightening and furiously intent.
| Original Score: B
An impressive application of mood and style can't really bring a skittering script into focus.
| Original Score: C+
There's a lot to think about. What's lacking here is something to care about.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's basically Mr. Brody's movie, and his performance is riveting.
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| Original Score: B
The movie, taking its cue from Jack's deep weariness and depression, trudges through its paces as if it were deep and meaningful, which I am afraid it is not.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Too much light shines through the holes of the plot, the tone gets stuck on the B-movie level, and the underpinnings of romance and revenge are trite for all the fancy trimmings.
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| Original Score: 2/4
On the surface, the film comes off as fairly clever, but the more you examine the plot, the more flaws you'll see.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Make no mistake, this movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.
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| Original Score: 2/5
I appreciate the way the story is developed, taking audiences into The Twilight Zone, but not leaving them stranded there.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A complex puzzle cooked up by some admittedly smart people, but populated by characters too artificial to ever care about.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A movie that seems intelligent until you catch on that it's all images and attitude without much underneath.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Makes little sense and much ado.
| Original Score: 2/4
What sounds formulaic is elevated by strong performances -- particularly from Brody -- interesting plot revelations and an approach that forces you to look into your soul, one of the scariest places for many of us.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A gruesome, pretentious and incompetent mess.
Too littered with loose ends and 'huh?' moments to work as the edgy sci-fi thriller-romance it wants to be.
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| Original Score: D
Feels like it must be the 12th jolt-laden morbid thriller to open this year, yet it's the first that doesn't insult your intelligence.
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| Original Score: B-
One can't help but wonder how American soldiers in Iraq would respond to seeing their inescapable reality used as fodder for an escapist thriller in which the real enemy is bad hospital management.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The hero's condition, which goes unconnected to the amnesia of war, instead becomes an allegory for a filmmaker forgetting his roots.
Straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.
| Original Score: 2/4
The Jacket is not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but filmmaker John Maybury has forged a mesmerizing mindblower.
