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Jacket, The
Warner Bros. // R // June 21, 2005
List Price: $24.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Jacket is a drama -- not the sort of thriller that the trailer implies -- centered around Gulf War veteran Jack Starks (Adrien Brody). After taking a bullet to the head during the war, Jack's memory fades away. He keeps his dog tags within arm's reach to remind him of his identity as he trots around Vermont, where one snowy winter he bumps into a young girl and her drunken mother whose truck is stalled. Jack's able to get their truck up and running in short order, almost as quickly as he establishes a rapport with young Jackie. 
Jack hands her his dog tags and hitches a ride with another stranger towards the Canadian border, only to soon find himself with both a bullet and a murder rap on his head. Jack's perceived mental state is such that he's institutionalized, but he may have been better off in prison. Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson) has been experimenting with a procedure he believes will strip away the layers of hate in his patients, pumping them full of a cocktail of various drugs, strapping them into a borderline-disturbing looking straightjacket, and locking them in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Most of them react with vivid hallucinations. Jack, on the other hand... Jack finds himself standing outside a mom-and-pop diner where he encounters a depressed young woman (Keira Knightley). After she takes him back to her place and passes out in a drunken stupor, Jack mills around a bit and stumbles upon his old dog tags. It turns out that he's holed up with Jackie and that he's been flung more than a decade into the future. Upon learning that he died in 1993, Jack bounds across time to discover how he was killed and predictably falls in love in the process.
The Jacket is the sort of movie where I'm sorely tempted to write some barely-polysyllabic review like "it's alright, I guess" and trail off. Neither impressed nor disappointed by much of anything about it, I'm not entirely sure what to say. One criticism I've heard leveled against The Jacket repeatedly is that it's too incoherent to follow, and on that, I'd disagree. The storytelling is non-linear, but I found it painless enough to piece together. Jack's not leaping chaotically through time -- he's either in the past or the future, and two sets of timelines aren't particularly tough to follow. As for how exactly Jack's body is being transported over a decade into the future, if that's even happening at all...? That's not made entirely clear, but I accepted the idea of an inmate hopping into the past in 12 Monkeys in much the same way, so I guess I can accept the flipside of that coin too. One major gripe I could level is that the ending seems too happy and sunny considering what had unfolded in the previous hour and a half. Since it's not clearly established if what we're seeing in the end is actually happening, there is a very valid interpretation that it's bittersweet rather than a saccharine Hollywood happy ending, but it's more fun to gripe if I pretend that it's a cop-out.
Adrien Brody has played enough brooding, battered men to effortlessly pull off a role like this, and his Jack has a sort of endearing awkwardness about him. There really isn't much chemistry between the two leads, and the way he strokes the hair of Jackie's younger incarnation after banging the older one is more than a little bit creepy. Keira Knightley adopts an indeterminate American accent for The Jacket, although her role doesn't seem to extend all that far beyond The Supportive Love Interest™.
Her character's underdeveloped, and although some of the tragedies in her life have driven her to poverty, depression, and alcoholism, The Jacket doesn't really invest any effort in trying to make her character sympathetic. Sure, she smokes in the bathtub and wears black nail polish...tortured! I get it. Not sure why I'm supposed to care, though. On the upside, she does get topless, although it's brief enough that most viewers will have to rewind and try to figure out if they're looking at Keira Knightley's chest or Adrien Brody's. Keira Knightley is underutilized, but Jennifer Jason Leigh's outright wasted, with her character having little to no impact on much of anything.
I'm almost completely indifferent towards The Jacket. Not compelling enough to seek out or dreadful enough to avoid, this is a movie best-suited for a rental or waiting for its inevitable appearance on one of the cable movie channels.
Video: Warner Home Video consistently puts out some of the most impressive looking DVDs of any studio, and The Jacket's flawless 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is another case-in-point. As should be expected from such a recent production, the source material is in immaculate condition. The predominately cold palette suits the overall tone of the film, and even in the dark confines of the morgue drawer, the image holds up remarkably well no matter how dimly-lit it may get. Some film grain is present, but that appears to be an intentional stylistic choice. With visuals this stylized, The Jacket requires a first-rate presentation on DVD, and Warner's delivered just that.
Audio: The nature of the movie doesn't lend itself to an all-out sonic assault, but the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (448Kbps) still does a reasonably nice job. Along with the opening sequence set during the Gulf War, the multichannel audio really kicks in whenever Jack is locked inside the drawer. The slammed door is accompanied by a thunderous boom from the subwoofer, and his hallucinations send various sound effects scattering from channel to channel. As this is a drama driven by a handful of characters interacting with one another, dialogue obviously gets a fair amount of emphasis, and it comes through without any concerns.
A Quebecois-flavored French dub is also offered in Dolby Digital 5.1, along with English closed captions and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: The Jacket's extras primarily consist of a pair of featurettes. At nearly half an hour in length, the most substantial of the two is "The Jacket: Project History and Deleted Scenes". The first few minutes feature brief comments from the film's
director and screenwriter, noting how they got involved with the movie. The remainder of the time alternates between notes from some of the talent involved (including stars Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley) and a series of deleted scenes. It's somewhat of a unique approach, mixing so much of this together instead of segmenting it into a series of shorter, individual featurettes. There's a fair amount of excised footage, but a lot of it's superfluous enough to be justifiably cut out, not to mention overindulgently stylized. It's worth sifting through just to see Jackie's trip through cyberspace and attempting to fathom how that could ever have been considered a good idea. In total, there are nine deleted scenes, an extended love scene, and three alternate endings with some minute yet incredibly significant changes from what made it into the final cut.
The nine-minute featurette "The Look of The Jacket" is aptly-titled, covering some of the visual effects in the film as well as its avant-garde influences. A theatrical trailer rounds out the extras, and it may be worth noting that the two featurettes as well as the trailer are all presented in anamorphic widescreen. The DVD also includes a set of 16x9 menus and twenty-five chapter stops.
Conclusion: If I hadn't been saddled with the task of writing a review afterwards, The Jacket would have been an instantly forgettable movie. A drama like this needs to establish some sort of emotional connection with the audience to work, but The Jacket doesn't make that effort -- I guess the movie assumes that someone spending $15.99 on the DVD is all the investment that's necessary. Hardly a disaster but unimpressive enough to warrant forking over a credit card, The Jacket is strictly rental territory. Rent It.
Jack hands her his dog tags and hitches a ride with another stranger towards the Canadian border, only to soon find himself with both a bullet and a murder rap on his head. Jack's perceived mental state is such that he's institutionalized, but he may have been better off in prison. Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson) has been experimenting with a procedure he believes will strip away the layers of hate in his patients, pumping them full of a cocktail of various drugs, strapping them into a borderline-disturbing looking straightjacket, and locking them in a morgue drawer for hours at a time. Most of them react with vivid hallucinations. Jack, on the other hand... Jack finds himself standing outside a mom-and-pop diner where he encounters a depressed young woman (Keira Knightley). After she takes him back to her place and passes out in a drunken stupor, Jack mills around a bit and stumbles upon his old dog tags. It turns out that he's holed up with Jackie and that he's been flung more than a decade into the future. Upon learning that he died in 1993, Jack bounds across time to discover how he was killed and predictably falls in love in the process. The Jacket is the sort of movie where I'm sorely tempted to write some barely-polysyllabic review like "it's alright, I guess" and trail off. Neither impressed nor disappointed by much of anything about it, I'm not entirely sure what to say. One criticism I've heard leveled against The Jacket repeatedly is that it's too incoherent to follow, and on that, I'd disagree. The storytelling is non-linear, but I found it painless enough to piece together. Jack's not leaping chaotically through time -- he's either in the past or the future, and two sets of timelines aren't particularly tough to follow. As for how exactly Jack's body is being transported over a decade into the future, if that's even happening at all...? That's not made entirely clear, but I accepted the idea of an inmate hopping into the past in 12 Monkeys in much the same way, so I guess I can accept the flipside of that coin too. One major gripe I could level is that the ending seems too happy and sunny considering what had unfolded in the previous hour and a half. Since it's not clearly established if what we're seeing in the end is actually happening, there is a very valid interpretation that it's bittersweet rather than a saccharine Hollywood happy ending, but it's more fun to gripe if I pretend that it's a cop-out.
Adrien Brody has played enough brooding, battered men to effortlessly pull off a role like this, and his Jack has a sort of endearing awkwardness about him. There really isn't much chemistry between the two leads, and the way he strokes the hair of Jackie's younger incarnation after banging the older one is more than a little bit creepy. Keira Knightley adopts an indeterminate American accent for The Jacket, although her role doesn't seem to extend all that far beyond The Supportive Love Interest™.
Her character's underdeveloped, and although some of the tragedies in her life have driven her to poverty, depression, and alcoholism, The Jacket doesn't really invest any effort in trying to make her character sympathetic. Sure, she smokes in the bathtub and wears black nail polish...tortured! I get it. Not sure why I'm supposed to care, though. On the upside, she does get topless, although it's brief enough that most viewers will have to rewind and try to figure out if they're looking at Keira Knightley's chest or Adrien Brody's. Keira Knightley is underutilized, but Jennifer Jason Leigh's outright wasted, with her character having little to no impact on much of anything. I'm almost completely indifferent towards The Jacket. Not compelling enough to seek out or dreadful enough to avoid, this is a movie best-suited for a rental or waiting for its inevitable appearance on one of the cable movie channels.
Video: Warner Home Video consistently puts out some of the most impressive looking DVDs of any studio, and The Jacket's flawless 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is another case-in-point. As should be expected from such a recent production, the source material is in immaculate condition. The predominately cold palette suits the overall tone of the film, and even in the dark confines of the morgue drawer, the image holds up remarkably well no matter how dimly-lit it may get. Some film grain is present, but that appears to be an intentional stylistic choice. With visuals this stylized, The Jacket requires a first-rate presentation on DVD, and Warner's delivered just that.
Audio: The nature of the movie doesn't lend itself to an all-out sonic assault, but the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (448Kbps) still does a reasonably nice job. Along with the opening sequence set during the Gulf War, the multichannel audio really kicks in whenever Jack is locked inside the drawer. The slammed door is accompanied by a thunderous boom from the subwoofer, and his hallucinations send various sound effects scattering from channel to channel. As this is a drama driven by a handful of characters interacting with one another, dialogue obviously gets a fair amount of emphasis, and it comes through without any concerns.
A Quebecois-flavored French dub is also offered in Dolby Digital 5.1, along with English closed captions and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: The Jacket's extras primarily consist of a pair of featurettes. At nearly half an hour in length, the most substantial of the two is "The Jacket: Project History and Deleted Scenes". The first few minutes feature brief comments from the film's
director and screenwriter, noting how they got involved with the movie. The remainder of the time alternates between notes from some of the talent involved (including stars Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley) and a series of deleted scenes. It's somewhat of a unique approach, mixing so much of this together instead of segmenting it into a series of shorter, individual featurettes. There's a fair amount of excised footage, but a lot of it's superfluous enough to be justifiably cut out, not to mention overindulgently stylized. It's worth sifting through just to see Jackie's trip through cyberspace and attempting to fathom how that could ever have been considered a good idea. In total, there are nine deleted scenes, an extended love scene, and three alternate endings with some minute yet incredibly significant changes from what made it into the final cut. The nine-minute featurette "The Look of The Jacket" is aptly-titled, covering some of the visual effects in the film as well as its avant-garde influences. A theatrical trailer rounds out the extras, and it may be worth noting that the two featurettes as well as the trailer are all presented in anamorphic widescreen. The DVD also includes a set of 16x9 menus and twenty-five chapter stops.
Conclusion: If I hadn't been saddled with the task of writing a review afterwards, The Jacket would have been an instantly forgettable movie. A drama like this needs to establish some sort of emotional connection with the audience to work, but The Jacket doesn't make that effort -- I guess the movie assumes that someone spending $15.99 on the DVD is all the investment that's necessary. Hardly a disaster but unimpressive enough to warrant forking over a credit card, The Jacket is strictly rental territory. Rent It.
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