\The Jacket"" begins with a reminder of ""Three Kings"" before giving way to ""12 Monkeys"" and a little bit of ""Slaughterhouse-Five."" With kaleidoscopic images, a time-traveling soldier and the bulk of its screentime in a mental institution, ""The Jacket"" is sometimes too fragmented to easily follow. However, it maintains a balance of equally disturbed lead characters and a steady built-in pace that provides a well-earned payoff in the final minutes.
Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) is a soldier in the Gulf War who takes a bullet to the head and is pronounced dead. He is revived with holes in his memory and too little outside help to get him back on his feet. As a hitchhiker, he helps a mother and her daughter start their truck and gives the girl his dog tags. Then he takes a ride only to be framed for the murder of a police officer. At his trial, he is judged mentally unsound and winds up in an asylum.
There he is put into a straitjacket and locked in a vault by Dr. Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson). In the midst of his confinement in 1992, his mind slips through the past and then goes into the future. He is left in the year 2007 outside a roadside diner, too desperate to provide for himself and too confused to sound sane. Jackie Price (Keira Knightley), a waitress, picks him up and takes him in for the night. After spotting his dog tags in Price's home, he tries to explain his story.
The tale he tells offers a stream of clipped scenes and steadily released developments, which make each of Starks' jumps to the future more important than the one before it. Pacing, which was effectively dismissed in the first 15 minutes of ""The Jacket,"" becomes the element that decides the quality of the film in its second half. The flash-forwards are only given enough time to explain Starks' stay in the asylum, which is all that is required.
Though there is little difference between 1992 and 2007, the Starks demeanor gives makes the years two different environments. Brody is in prime form, going from the exasperated ward patient to the apologetic drifter with ease. His long, thin face and expressive eyes make his supposed insanity seem much more pronounced than Bruce Willis pulled off in ""12 Monkeys."" Furthermore, his adjustment as a Gulf War veteran is on par with Billy Pilgrim's tale in ""Slaughterhouse-Five."" Brody has a bead on Starks, but Knightley needs some polish with Price's character.
When she is a disconsolate waitress, her cynicism comes off as spot-on. Her glare has fierceness to it that Brody's gaze complements. However, she is in the habit of letting her jaw drop a half-inch and parting her lips at every opportune moment. Her expressions don't shift like Brody's and the stone-faced composure only works three-quarters of the time.
In the midst of ""The Jacket's"" chaotic imagery and jumping narrative style, the leads have to make sense of it all. Fortunately, Brody's smooth presentation does just that while Knightley pulls through in the end. Along the way, the time traveling and pacing combine for a thrilling movie that has its share of confusion, but also enough seriousness to dispel it.
