The Jacket: Critic Reviews

Feels like it must be the 12th jolt-laden morbid thriller to open this year, yet it's the first that doesn't insult your intelligence.

Make no mistake, this movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.

Here, Maybury is just arty for art's sake, filming entire scenes in close-ups so big that viewers leave the theater knowing way more than they ever wanted to about the lead actors' bridgework.

The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of Jacob's Ladder, The Silence of the Lambs and Memento.

Too much light shines through the holes of the plot, the tone gets stuck on the B-movie level, and the underpinnings of romance and revenge are trite for all the fancy trimmings.

The hero's condition, which goes unconnected to the amnesia of war, instead becomes an allegory for a filmmaker forgetting his roots.

I enjoyed the electroshock ambience, and accepted the ride as a jumped-up sci-fi mystery.

At times it seems like a daring mindbender. At other times, it just seems unintentionally absurd.

It's basically Mr. Brody's movie, and his performance is riveting.

There's a lot to think about. What's lacking here is something to care about.

The movie, taking its cue from Jack's deep weariness and depression, trudges through its paces as if it were deep and meaningful, which I am afraid it is not.

What sounds formulaic is elevated by strong performances -- particularly from Brody -- interesting plot revelations and an approach that forces you to look into your soul, one of the scariest places for many of us.

Makes little sense and much ado.

If you can buy the entire psychic flying about and enjoy a bit of sick torture, The Jacket is a lot of fun -- fast, frightening and furiously intent.

On the surface, the film comes off as fairly clever, but the more you examine the plot, the more flaws you'll see.

The acting is uniformly excellent.

A gruesome, pretentious and incompetent mess.

Pic begins as a potentially intriguing study of the depersonalizing effects of warfare, only to end up a pastiche of time-travel and psycho-ward movie cliches.

The characters in the tepid sci-fi thriller The Jacket, starring Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley, are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist.

A somber piece of intellectually challenging entertainment.

It suffers from a common thriller syndrome these days: the desire to explain away madness with logic.

Apparently, there's a lot less to this picture than meets the eye.

I appreciate the way the story is developed, taking audiences into The Twilight Zone, but not leaving them stranded there.

The Jacket is not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but filmmaker John Maybury has forged a mesmerizing mindblower.

Straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.