The Jacket

Directed by John Maybury. Starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, and Kris Kristofferson. Rating unavailable.

From the pedigrees involved with this stylish-looking psychological thriller-jeez, George Clooney and Stephen Soderbergh even helped produce it-you might fairly expect at least, you know, a stylish-looking psychological thriller. Although it's certainly pictorial, The Jacket has all the psychological thrills of a visit to H&R Block.

Taking a quick vacation from his career as an award-winning movie actor, Adrien Brody dials in a smirking performance as Jack Starks (yeah, right), a wounded Gulf War I veteran with walking amnesia. Jack is wandering through snow-blanketed Vermont when he has the bad luck to stumble upon a boozed-up mom (Kelly Lynch) and her cute daughter, Jackie (memorable Laura Marano), by the side of the road. He's cussed out for his efforts to help them, and he has worse luck with a con on the run (Brad Renfro), who leaves the dazed vet in a heap o' trouble.

Justice must have moved a lot more swiftly in the 1990s, as Jack is immediately given an indefinite stay at a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The most insane criminal there, though, appears to be the head doctor-played with maximum grizzle by Kris Kristofferson-who wants to cure psychotics by drugging them to the gills, strapping them in straitjackets on gurneys, and shoving them in drawers of the basement morgue.

The doctor presumably had a brilliant future waiting for him in Guantanamo; this is glimpsed when Jack is driven to have more flashbacks than Darren Aronofsky on acid. He also starts waking up in 2007 as well. Really. Suddenly adrift in the same New England spot, he soon finds that little Jackie has turned into a hot babe with her mother's addictions and the permanent, open-mouthed pout of Keira Knightley, minus the English accent.

Also going Yank on us is Daniel Craig as a verbose fellow patient who jolts the movie awake long enough for it to collapse under the weight of trying to imitate One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Then there's Jennifer Jason Leigh, blindly wandering the halls as a doctor who has no idea what a hellhole the hospital has become.

The Brits are on hand thanks to director John Maybury, who did a remarkable job capturing the red-drenched dementia of painter Francis Bacon in Love Is the Devil. Here, he seems to be playing a talented outsider who would like to break into the more remunerative Hollywood system without appearing to sell out altogether. A beyond-gratuitous sex scene kind of says it all, sadly-which is more than is said by the committee-written script that utterly ignores time-jumping opportunities to comment on the two Iraq wars but does manage to confuse news footage from them.

Not that any of this matters, because the movie will give you a case of sitting amnesia: you'll start forgetting the film before it's even over.

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