The Jacket – Review

The basics of The Jacket may seem pretty regular at first, and nothing I say will really get into the nature of the story, just setup. Opening with wartime imagery through night vision cameras, explosions blast and bullets fly. Military chatter sprinkles the footage as enemy combatants are killed by weaponry. This is Iraq, 1991, and American soldiers are on the ground while planes are bombing from above.

27-year-old Soldier Jack Starks (Brody) tries to help a young Iraqi boy, only to get shot in the head. Miraculously he survives. A little bit more to the right, and the bullet would not have come out. Retrograde amnesia and recovering from multiples surgeries is the soldier’s next path.

A year later he is back home in the States, however with limited resources. As he walks down a lonesome literal road, he finds a broken-down truck along with a young girl and her drunken mother (Lynch). He helps work on the engine, however when the truck is back running, she drunkenly lashes out. He continues his walk.

Eventually he is picked up as a hitchhiker by a seemingly good Samaritan (Renfro), and things get muddier. All of a sudden, his mind starts breaking. An incident has occurred while road-tripping with this strange man, or has it? His mind is found too broken for trial, and he winds up committed to an institution.

But… what is the reality? What happened to Starks on the road with the stranger? As Jack settles into medication and therapy in his new asylum, answers evade him, and even odder occurrences happen.

Not getting too much into the almost Sci-Fi nature of the story only allows me to cover so much, however the bottom line is that this film is a semi-creepy and fully trippy tale of psychological tension and madness. As one story seems to finally present itself some cohesion, another tale begins to weave in the narrative further blurring the situation.

If you as a viewer have to have every single answer, this movie may not be for you, however if you like odd stories with abstract concepts then try The Jacket. The film is very well done, and has a great cast. It is bizarre, but quite interesting, and gives a lot to think about. Despite what I said above for story setup, the ending is not the same as Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which is another great psychological film.

I don’t think this movie found much of an audience nor did critics love it, but it is competently done, and has a lot of great actors. Its abstract nature likely turned off some viewers, and the marketing was odd which if I remember correctly presented it as if almost a horror film (it’s not really). Overall, I found more good than bad here, and plenty to ponder.