The Hindu Business Line : <I>The Jacket</I>: Shuttling between two time zones

THE Jacket has its share of holes in the story but in a season of gorillas in love, it should go down as a product from the saner half of Hollywood.

And sanity is what this film's theme is all about.

The story synopsis: After a gunshot wound on the head, Gulf War veteran Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) returns home to Vermont. He is suffering from amnesia. Accused of murdering a police officer, Jack is committed to a mental institution, where Dr Thomas Becker (Kris Kristofferson) injects him with experimental drugs, straps him periodically to a straight jacket and shuts him up in a body drawer at the basement morgue. In his drugged state, Jack's mind propels him into the future where he meets Jackie Price (Keira Knightley) and discovers that he would die in four days.

The story shuttles between two time zones - 1992, which is when Jack is under Dr Becker's treatment and 2007, when he meets Jackie. Rather shallow plot you could say, even déjà vu, what with all those clones and imitations of The Sixth Sense that keep going around. Save Brody and some restrained inputs from Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Dr Beth Lorenson) and Daniel Craig (as Rudy Mackenzie, fellow inmate at the institution), there is little by way of acting. Knightley, as usual, is a picturesque pout; Jackie Price doesn't require anything more either.

Blame it on the overdose of brainless action (and at times melodrama) that has been Hollywood fare off late, The Jacket slowly grows on you. It kicks off like a typically smart film made by someone from the ad world, striking graphics and deft edits to portray Jack's drugged state and the shift in time zones. Thus encouraged to dismiss the film you almost do so when Jack's life at the institution begins and everybody gets busy looking adequately lunatic. But from the moment of a death foretold, a small commitment to watch takes root and by the time it ends, you say - okay; am at least no worse from how I started. That is, despite the end being a challenge to the laws of time travel. Jack corrects the present to restore a loving mother to Jackie, a development that could technically alter his position in the future as he saw it in his drugged state. But after a gorilla who swings a blonde from hand to foot and back to hand while fighting three T-Rexes at the same time, who gives a damn for such slip-ups? The Jacket hits theatres here on Friday.