The jacket

Year of release : 2005

Run time : 1h43m

Genre : Psychological Thriller / Sci Fi / Mystery / Suspense

Cast : Adrien Brody, Keira Knightly, Daniel Craig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kris Kristofferson, Kelly Lynch

The movie is loosely based on the 1915 Jack London novel “The star rover”, published in the UK as “The jacket”.

In the Gulf War, soldier Jack Starks is trying to save a kid who is caught with the grown ups. The child sho0ts him in the head, but Jack somehow survives.

Back to Vermont, one year later, in 1992, he is trying to hitch a ride, and first encounters a mother with her daughter. The mother seems drunk or high, and he speaks with the daughter, Jackie, who tells him what’s wrong with their car, and he fixes it.

The girl sees his dog tags, and she likes them, so he gives them to her.

The mother comes to, and tells him to stay away from them, as she gets in the driver’s seat.

A man stops to take him, and they are pulled over by a police car. The next thing he knows is he is tried for murdering a police officer, but he can’t remember a thing. He is found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental institution for the criminally insane.

There, his doctor thinks he can treat his patients by putting them in a straight-jacket and locking them in the morgue drawer for a few hours.

So, one night, he is being sedated, and taken down there. In the dark of the drawer which looks like a coffin, he gets flashes of his past, and is taken out after 3 hours.

Inside the mental institution Jack befriends a man who says he tried to k1ll his wife 30 times until she put him in the mental institution, and one of the doctors, who suspects his doctor is using inhumane treatment on his patients.

The next time he is being put inside the morgue drawer, Jack wakes up by a gas station, in winter (the movie was filmed in winter, as it’s winter the whole time). A beautiful woman leaves the near-by restaurant, and sees him, and stops in front of him, offering him a ride, as it’s Christmas’ Eve.

Because he has nowhere to go, she takes him to her place and calls the shelter who can’t take him in.

While she is sleeping, Jack snoops around, and finds his dog tags and pictures of the woman, and realizes she’s the little girl, Jackie, he helped before he was institutionalized.

She seems to have fallen into her mother’s footsteps, as she’s a drunk, and falls asleep with the cigarette in her hand.

Her bills say it’s 2007.

Jack wakes her up, and she tells him her mother died a long time ago, as she fell asleep with the cigarette in her hand. Ironically, if Jack wouldn’t have been there that night, she would have had the very same faith.

Jack tells her who he is, that he gave her the dog tags, but Jackie says Jack Starks died in 1993, and throws him out of the house!

The moment he gets out of the house, he wakes up in the morgue drawer.

After, he is dehydrated, as apparently this method of “curing” someone is slowly k1lling him, as it did the man before him.

Jack manages to walk outside ,and thinks about leaving the institution as he thinks being locked in the drawer is going to k1ll him in 4 days, but doctor Beth Lorenson comes after him.

At one of the group sessions, Jack instigates the other inmates, and he ends up in the jacket again. He now sees what happened when the cop was k1lled, and knows it wasn’t him. The cop sho0ting him while aiming at the driver who sh0t him.

He then travels 15 years into the future, to the restaurant Jackie works at. She gives him information about the 2 doctors, and they even go see them.

He spends time with Jackie, and when he goes back, he tells the doctors what they told him in the future, to doctor Becker who put him in the drawer, about the other patients just like him, who died due to his treatment, and to doctor Lorenson, how to fix her friend’s child, who had seizures unbeknownst to them, that she fixed with electroconvulsive therapy.

As he’s running out of time, the next time he goes into the future, he asks Jackie for her home address from when she used to live with her mother, as he wants to help them if he can.

Because Jack helped doctor Lorenson with her friend’s kid, she helps him with what he needs to do.

I personally liked the movie, it’s one of my favorites from 20 years ago which still hold my attention.

I liked the fact he found a few people who understood him, like the crazy guy, and the 2 women who helped him, one in the future, the other in the present. Or more like, they helped each other.

I liked how sometimes it was filmed in mirrors or in reflections (in this case I think it was to suggest Jack’s state of mind who was given pills and couldn’t think straight ).

A few things that bothered me were : Jack and other characters wear onesies which I find odd considering he and the other patients are always drugged out of their minds. Do you think they can manage to get out of them to go to the bathroom?

The movie has these uneasy close-ups to their eyes (these are fine, as mostly, it’s Jack’s eyes, and they have visual effects in them) and mouths (these are not).

Apart from this,Adrien Brody has beautiful eyes.

The acting was good, especially from Adrien Brody and Daniel Craig.

The soundtrack was good.

The visual effects were good.

The movie received mixed reviews, with a 44% rating from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and a 73% rating from the audience on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 7.3 user score on Metacritic, but grossed only 21.1 million dollars at the box office, against a budget of 28.5 million dollars, being a major flop.

You can watch the full movie, for free, on the Ok.Ru platform :

https://ok.ru/video/9741975161413

Rating : Worth a watch !