E-Mail This Article to a Friend THE JACKET

John Maybury’s sci-fi psychogram opens with a flash and a bang: a montage of 1991 Gulf War night-vision bombings and a fatal shot to the head of GI Jack Starks (Adrien Brody). Starks miraculously returns from the dead only to be shot again in Vermont. Blamed unjustly for the murder of a policeman, he lands in an insane asylum, where the experiments of a sadistic doctor (Kris Kristofferson) have him hallucinating the future. Sound improbable? Doubtless, but that’s not what turns this well-intentioned riddle into muddle. Although the initial sequences demonstrate Maybury’s mastery in rendering Starks’s fractured psyche, from that point on, the film slowly dissolves into One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Sixth Sense with a romantic subplot made slightly perverse by the time-travel logic. Unfortunately, The Jacket recuperates neither the allegorical ambition of the former nor the tidy payoff of the latter. What begins as a pointed commentary on violence and the media ends up as a confused celebration of family values. (102 minutes)