It would be easy to dismiss The Jacket, as Mr. Cranky did wittily. It really didn't have many supporters. Critics didn't much care for it. Rotten Tomatoes shows mostly negative reviews. Audiences didn't think much of it either. It was a colossal dud at the box office, opening with a measly two million dollar weekend and dying soon thereafter. And I don't suppose that its investors will be that happy with it, either, since the production budget was $19 million, and a 1300 screen roll-out must have incurred some substantial distribution costs. There must have been some marketing costs as well.

To make matters worse, it's a friggin' time-travel movie. Even Ed Wood thought those were cheesy.

So you should give it a pass at your video store, right? Maybe not. I started out skeptical, but the film has a lot of positives, and it won me over.

Let me deal with the subject of time-travel movies. There are many critics who want to pick apart their plots as illogical. Well, no shit! Let's just lay our cards on the table honestly, shall we? Every time-travel movie that has ever been made is completely illogical. In fact, I have even traveled into the future, and I can assure you that every time travel movie that will ever be made will be completely illogical. Can you guess why? Your thinking time is up. It is because time-travel back to the past does not exist. I can't say for certain that the entire concept is to be dismissed categorically. Perhaps somebody somewhere in the universe will figure out how to navigate the curves of space and use that navigation to warp time in some manner. Who knows? But I can tell you with absolute certainty that from now until the time when our sun burns into an ember, human beings will never discover how to go back into the past. Can you guess how I figured that out? I think it will be clear to you if you think about it.

Sure, time travel movies are dumb. Sure, you can pick their plots apart. Let's face it, all werewolf, vampire, supernatural, time-travel and zombie movies are dumb. As we approach these sorts of films with our critical faculties, we can either dismiss them all as crap, or we can try to address them within the context of the genres we enjoy, and ask ourselves the key questions about those types of movies.  "What is it about movies that we like? When people ask us why a movie is good, what are the various reasons we offer in justification? What are the different reasons people go to movies in the first place?" Those of you who are mature and sensible will evaluate time-travel films by concluding that the fictionalized representation of time travel is something which expresses the innermost workings of our subconscious minds.

The concept of time travel always has and always will fascinate us. We long to travel to the past and the future because we possess complicated and curious minds filled with speculative thoughts. We regret things we did, and wish we could go back to undo them. We loved people in our individual pasts, in times when life seemed better than the present, and we long to go back and live in those times again. We dream of going back to the past knowing what we know now, able to capitalize on opportunities we missed. We are painfully aware of how our own mortality prevents us from seeing how the story of humanity ends, and yet we are involved in that story and, as with any good yarn that involves us, we want to see how it turns out. We dream of what the future might be like, and we would like to believe that we will somehow be able to look down upon it from the great beyond. We know that man will discover more and more of the secrets of the cosmos, and observe more of the beauty of the universe, and we want to know what is out there, so we dream of transporting ourselves to a future where man has opened some of the doors currently closed to us.

Yup, that's what you mature and sensible people might think. As for me, I just prefer to dismiss them all as crap.

I'm kidding.

Well, sort of. Except for the werewolf movies. You really can pretty much throw all of those in the crapper, except the comedies.

But with time-travel films, it isn't the gimmick that is important, but what one does with the gimmick. Does it engage us? Does it thrill us? Does it send shivers up our spines? Does it move us?

The Jacket begins with a soldier "dying" in the First Gulf War, but he manages to come back to consciousness, apparently with many symptoms of battlefield shock. A year later, soldier Jack is civilian Jack, hitchhiking on the side of a snow-covered road when he stops to help out some stranded motorists, a little girl and her drunken mother. Eventually our hero gets a ride from a psychotic guy who kills a policeman and leaves Jack to take the rap. Since Jack has all kinds of mental issues to begin with, and can't seem to recall what actually happened between him and the dead policeman, he is eventually committed to the loony bin. Once there, he is placed in some kind of experimental treatment which involves mind-altering drugs and sensory deprivation. The treatment seems to be even loonier than the patients: the doctor straps his drugged patients into strait-jackets and uses the morgue cabinets as his makeshift sensory deprivation area.

Irrespective of what the doctor intends, the bizarre treatment does have a major impact on Jack. It sends him fifteen years into the future, where he again encounters the stranded motorist girl, now grown into sad womanhood as a chain-smoking Goth waitress in a redneck diner. They strike up a relationship after she overcomes her incredulity about his time-travel story. (He offers details that he could not have known unless he was there on that day in her childhood.) The film then shifts back and forth from the events of Dec 25-31, 1992 to the events of Dec 25-31, 2007. Jack's consciousness moves to 2007 when he is in the sensory deprivation vault, and returns to 1992 when he is brought out of the experimental treatment. While he is in the future, Jack finds out that he died on January 1, 1993. This gives him only six days in which he may either prevent his death or do something else worthwhile with his time-traveling abilities.

The ending isn't really comprehensible, as is typical of time-travel films. Let's just say it's open to multiple interpretations. I do like the process of getting there. The director uses a combination of pictures and music and ideas to hook the viewer into the story both intellectually and emotionally. He was also fortunate or smart enough to hire three terrific actors for the main roles: Adrian Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Keira Knightley.

What can you say? I was into the mystery, and I was moved by some of the scenes. The film has its weak moments, and it gets a little too "It's A Wonderful Life" for the more cynical modern sensibility, but overall I think you might consider ignoring the weak reviews and ticket sales. Give it a look.

I went into further detail in my review at The Movie House, but those details are basically only intended as discussion points if you have already seen the movie, since they are filled with minutiae and spoilers.