John Maybury
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Connections, in both directions
What follows is a less effects-ridden blend of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Jacob's Ladder, with a little Altered States thrown in for good measure.
While not as far out on the limb of paradoxes as films like Jacob's Ladder and The Butterfly Effect, The Jacket nevertheless has the capacity to provoke thought and consternation.
It aspires for a "Jacob's Ladder" tone, wants a political agenda in the mode of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and suffers from too many gratuitous flashback sequences to a pair of shooting incidents.
There is an air of trying to cover too much ground in “The Jacket” as it combines the essence of such films as “Altered States” and “Jacob’s Ladder” and includes, at least on a cursory level, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Jacob's Ladder is evoked only in the loosest possible sense.
But it becomes increasingly clear that "The Jacket" is doing nothing but sampling elements of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Memento" without offering more than hackneyed solutions, including a rather cheesy conclusion.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Directed by Miloš Forman
influenced The Jacket (2005)
Themes Plot
It aspires for a "Jacob's Ladder" tone, wants a political agenda in the mode of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and suffers from too many gratuitous flashback sequences to a pair of shooting incidents.
There is an air of trying to cover too much ground in “The Jacket” as it combines the essence of such films as “Altered States” and “Jacob’s Ladder” and includes, at least on a cursory level, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
If you’ve enjoyed movies like Slaughterhouse 5, D.O.A., 12 Monkeys or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, then you probably shouldn’t bother with The Jacket until it comes out on DVD.
The hospital is populated with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” characters and has a maverick doctor in its midst.
The Jacket essentially plays out as two movies: a slow-paced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest style drama, and a bizarre, confusing sci-fi tale with elements of romance.
The Jacket is plainly derivative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jacob’s Ladder, juiced up with interesting visuals, fine performances — and some chronological monkey-business.
The story that unfolds as a result could have become cerebral junk-food, like last year's logic-deficient time-travel/alternative-reality B-movie "The Butterfly Effect."
A shot of power lines suggests the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future, yet The Jacket's fascination with such temporal associations is superficial—unlike even Ashton Kutcher's incompetent The Butterfly Effect , Maybury's film spends little thought on the time-space ramifications of its decade-hopping story.
While not as far out on the limb of paradoxes as films like Jacob's Ladder and The Butterfly Effect, The Jacket nevertheless has the capacity to provoke thought and consternation.
What keeps The Jacket from descending fully into the truly absurd depths of last years The Butterfly Effect are the unwavering performances of its leads.
"The Jacket" is patched together with pieces of "The Butterfly Effect," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Altered States" and "The Crow," among others, but some of its own conceits do not work particularly well.
Unlike, say, the similarly themed Primer or Donnie Darko, which rode their temporal-mangling premises all the way into the loopy (yet still somehow logical) stratosphere, director John Maybury (previously responsible for the visually interesting Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil) and screenwriter Massy Tadjedin seem unsure what to do with the open-ended opportunities suggested by their material.
The body of The Jacket is presented as something organic and penetrable (compare to the orifice that opens from a screen in Videodrome or Donnie Darko ), and once Jack is reborn, if temporarily, into his own future to meet little Jackie grown into Keira Knightly, I'd argue that any familiarity we feel with the conceit has to do with how natural Maybury's made it seem in his visual vernacular, as opposed to its similarity to other works (which, after all, usually go the other direction ( Back to the Future , "Quantum Leap")).
One provocation is particularly amusing, when Jack supports fellow patient Rudy Mackenzie's (Daniel Craig, "The Mother") ramblings about the Organization for the Organized in group therapy, beginning a mini riot.