Reading the advance publicity for John Mayberry’s new sci-fi thriller, audiences may be prepared for the whiz-bang beginning and the flashback special effects. But they won’t be prepared for the obnoxious sound track that threatens to pummel them into submission, nor will they be able to fill in the blanks in the thin re-hash of several time-worn plots. This film has a nice blend of time travel, evil doctor, drug abuse and wounded war veteran themes, but does not do any of them justice. All have been done better and their gratuitous, budget-conscious inclusion in this film adds nothing to either the movie or to the genre.
Using drugs, mental instability or amnesia to show emotional or intellectual transition is a cop-out. Neither readers or viewers are moved by stories that show someone being tortured and then feeling happy when the torture stops. Nor are they moved by someone seeing reality again when the drug trip wears off. Many of us in the audience have already been there. We know what it feels like to sober up or sleep off that last toke; it is not a big deal, unless we have a car accident or get married in the process.
The fact that this plot revolves around the mentally scarred war veteran Jack Starks (Adrian Brody) starting out sick and getting sicker at the hands of lunatic Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson---don’t ask) does little to propel the story forward. Starks is implicated in a cop killing, judged insane by a kangaroo court and mistreated by stereotypical cretins working in an insane asylum. If this plot sounds familiar, it is. And almost too bad to be true. But the worst is yet to come.
When Kristofferson applies a new form of treatment to the unfortunate Starks that has more in common with canning tuna than re-tuning the cranium, flashbacks take Starks to another time and place. The sound-effects accompanying the flashbacks take the audience to immediate head-aches. More than banal, they are downright obnoxious. Director Maybury should know better than to attempt to torture the audience into feeling emotions that are supposed to be acted by Mr. Brody. Maybury also needs to be reminded that, given modern technology, it is entirely possible for anyone to create a variety of sounds that will be painful to the audience. This can be done by either increasing the volume or by varying the frequencies, two techniques that someone in the crew of Jacket has completely mastered. Or maybe they recorded nonsense sounds and then played them backwards. Now there’s a twist.
Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley star in 'The Jacket'
We all would have been better off if he would have let Brody act the pain instead of making us feel it.
As the movie progresses, we see more of Keira Knightley in the part of Jackie, a woman born to lose but who will someday see the good side Dr. Becker’s zip-lock treatment. She is involved with Starks in several different dimensions, as it were, including time, space and that mental state we get into when our brain explodes like a rat gnawing through a power line. Starks may be weird, but he still has time to stop and help Knightley and her terminally alcoholic mom (played well, if briefly, by Kelly Lynch). Later, under the influence of Dr. Becker’s mind-expanding drugs, Starks gets to help them again.
We also see more of Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dr. Lorenson, the good doctor counterpart to the bent Becker. Dr. Lorenson has words with Dr. Becker when his patients show a tendency to flip out and kill themselves, assault others or simply walk around with their eyes turned backwards into their heads. But, of course, she does nothing to change things because Dr. Becker has a considerable reputation and can, more-or-less, do whatever he feels like in this particular asylum. Besides, he sounds so sincere...
Brad Renfro rounds out the group with a short, but not so sweet, part as a man who gets everything started for Starks in a bad sort of way. But he does his dirty work well. The great cast makes the last half of the movie more pleasant to watch as the painful special effects in the beginning give way to actual drama. This provides an agreeable pacing and the movie gets better as it progresses. But, sadly, it never gets never good enough to make a wave in the sci-fi thriller gene pool.
The casting of Kris Kristofferson will be a modest pleasure to some of the die-hard 60s fans in the audience; but as the demented genius Dr. Becker he is hopeless. The other actors were a pleasure to watch, but Kris did not fit in. The cast had fairly neutral accents but he sounds like the gambler with whom Kenny Rogers shared that last gulp of whiskey back in the 1970s. Maybe he is simply too down-to-earth for any movie with even a hint of sci-fi.
A good first try for Maybury, but viewers be forewarned that they better bring a burning thirst for sci-fi and evil doctors to this one or they will be disappointed. If travel through time and space is the inspiration of the moment, “Matrix” has ten times the special effects and “Being John Malkovitch” ten times the originality. Both Brody and Knightley deserve better and the somewhat delayed opening of this flick until the dark depths of winter seems to admit that.
The Jacket opens in theatres across the USA on Friday and hits the UK on May 13. Further details and media in our database .
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