The Jacket

Adrien Brody liked staying in character off set for 'The Jacket'.

Herald rating: **

Channelling everything from The Manchurian Candidate to Chris Marker's landmark "still movie" La Jetee, this feature may impress those who believe in time travel as a reality and not just a sci-fi device.

Although it is relentlessly, exasperatingly improbable, it asks to be accepted as a naturalist drama. It also wants us to overlook its sloppy internal logic and just go with the flow.

Director Maybury - whose Love and the Devil, about the English painter Francis Bacon, was as good a film about an artist as I've seen - swamps us with style in the hope that no one will notice the threadbare substance.

It doesn't work.

Brody plays Jack Starks, a GI in the first Gulf War, who recovers after being pronounced dead from a head wound.

A year later, hitchhiking in snowbound Vermont, he is implicated in a shooting and arrested for murder. His head injury has made him prone to blackouts and he can't remember what happened, so he's convicted and committed to an asylum where the evil Dr Becker (Kristofferson) subjects him to ... Well, let's just say it gets ugly and involves the title's jacket ...

But as Starks undergoes some beastly treatment, he finds himself flashing forward in time where he meets a young woman (Knightley, shallow as a puddle) who was a child on the Vermont roadside and may be able to help him prove his innocence.

Maybury deploys a variety of trickery - fast edits, extreme close-ups, freaky music - to try to scare us, but it's as hokey as hell.

Brody, who reportedly asked to be treated like Starks during the dinner breaks so he could stay in the mood, is effective enough, although it's irritating how his designer hairdo never has a hair out of place.

The film's problem is that it wants to be some sort of metaphysical brainteaser, but the writer forgets to put any ideas in there. Instead he makes excuses by having Starks utter several sentences beginning, "I know this doesn't make any sense but ... " Never a truer word spoken.

CAST: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Daniel Craig

DIRECTOR: John Maybury

RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes

RATING: R16, violence and content that may disturb

SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday