Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I read a very, very early draft of this one, and then it sort of dropped off of my radar. Now we’re hearing that it’s begun screening, and here’s one man’s take on what he saw:
Hi guys,
Moonshine here, again. Last week (6/9), I took in another very early sneak peek of an upcoming flick. This time it was Adrien Brody's latest, "The Jacket," which is apparently not due until next February. That long-distant release date is a good thing because the movie needs a little work. I'm hoping the discussion group I saw them assembling in the theater gave them some good advice, but maybe not. There was a guy outside the theater afterwards bitching up a storm that they'd recruited him before the movie, but when they found out he gave the movie a poor rating they told him to go home. So who knows?
Here's the set-up, and it's a convoluted one. Jack is a Gulf War soldier who's way too trusting and kind. In an opening scene of brutal wartime battle, we see him getting a little distressed that his fellow soldiers are manhandling an Iraqi mother and her pre-teen son. The mother gets dragged off, and Jack approaches the rattled kid. He takes his helmet off and smiles at the kid, who pulls a pistol and shoots Jack in the head. In a brief voiceover narration, Jack tells us this is the first time he died. He's assumed to be dead, but a battlefield medic soon realizes that he's not. We next see him in a veteran's hospital, where doctors are explaining that Jack suffers from unexpected bouts of amnesia and they're sending him home to the States. Then we see Jack in some bleak-looking, snowy, rural area. He's walking down a country road and comes across a mother and daughter by the side of the road with their stalled truck. The mother (Kelly Lynch) is stinking drunk, sobbing and basically useless, but the little girl is really cute and engaging. Jack drops his bag, which has his dogtags on it, and the little girl asks what the dogtags are, then asks if she can have them. Jack readily gives them up, then helps the girl get her mom's truck started. As soon as the truck engine starts revving, drunken mom suddenly rares up and pushes Jack aside, screaming at him, "What are you doing?" The little girl yells back that Jack started their truck, but mom just crams her in the truck and speeds off. Jack keeps on walking and soon is picked up by a motormouthed guy who promises to drive him to the state border. Brad Renfro was billed on the flyer I picked up for this flick, but I didn't remember seeing him anywhere in the movie, so I'm guessing maybe he was this guy. If so, he was virtually uncrecognizable. Anyway, Jack starts looking tired or a little spacey, and suddenly motormouth guy asks him if he's ever been to jail. Jack says no, and then we see flashing lights behind the car. Motormouth guy says that he never wants to go back and pulls over. Cop gets out of the car. End of scene. Suddenly, Jack's on a witness stand trying to explain that he doesn't remember. A lawyer badgers him about only remembering his friends Jackie and Jane (the little girl and mom) and nothing else, and how hard it is to believe that. A hallucinatory scene of competing voices cuts in, Jack sputtering to explain, a doctor explaining how amnesia has fucked Jack up, a military man says that after what Jack went through in the Gulf he's not responsible for his deeds even if he did kill the cop. Then Jack's suddenly being sentenced to an asylum for the criminally insane.
At the asylum, he's put in the care of a big baddie doc, played by Kris Kristofferson, and the doc's gleefully sadistic henchmen, one of whom is Mackenzie Phillips from One Day At A Time, playing an absurdly stereotypical caricature of an insane asylum nurse. She even drags a nightstick across the bars of Jack's cell at one point, which made me and a few other audience members laugh out loud in a scene that's not supposed to be funny one bit. Oh, and there's also some other wet noodle young doctor that follows Kristofferson around, but has little reason to be in the movie as far as I could tell, except maybe to be yelled at by Kristofferson. I'm sorry to say this, but Kristofferson sucked in this movie and the moviemakers didn't help. It seemed to me that whenever you got a full-on shot of the guy, it looked like he was reciting lines, or maybe even reading them off a cue card. And more often than not, they shot scenes of only his mouth moving as he talked, or his beady eyes staring out from a leathered face. I guess this was supposed to remind us of the mindfucking that was being done to poor Jack, but it seemed retarded to me and made me groan one too many times. Anyway, sick Doc Kristofferson decides to treat Jack by pumping him full of experimental drugs, cinch him into a straitjacket that binds his body from neck to ankles, then his sadistic henchmen shove him in a body drawer in the hospital's basement morgue overnight. It's apparently supposed to create a womb-like state, though to what end the doctor is aiming I don't think is ever explained. It's just a device to really get the movie going. In the drawer, Jack suddenly starts getting flashbacks, seeing confusing images, and voila, he's suddenly transported, PHYSICALLY, 15 years into the future. There he's picked up by a sympathetic chick named Jackie (played by Keira Knightley, who's severely uglied up in horrid stringy, dyed black hair, gloomy black eyeliner and uber white trash clothes and lifestyle). It's Christmas Eve and Jackie feels sorry for the guy, and since she can't find space for him in a shelter, she lets him stay with her. She goes to take a bath and Jack starts snooping around. He makes a meal for them, then suddenly finds a set of dogtags. Holy cow, they're HIS dogtags! What's going on? He asks her what's her name, where she got them. Then what year it is. She tells him it's 2007, and he tells her who he is, that they're his dogtags. Jackie freaks and kicks him out. Then he's back in the drawer in the basement and freaking out.
Long story made short: this happens a number of times, every time Doc Kristofferson crams him in the drawer, and Jack's story and memories are revealed more and more with each quantum leap into the future. Over a series of time travel visits, Jack finds out that he will die in a few days, though how and who kills him is uncertain. Jackie comes around and helps him to figure things out and hopefully to prevent his death.
There's also subplots galore.
Jackie's life in the future is dismal - she's a waitress in a shithole roadside diner, her mom died sometime in the past when she fell asleep with a cigarette and burnt to death, and she's just got nothing to show for her life.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays another doc at the hospital, a mousy, timid good doc who's suspicious of Kristofferson's creepy sadism. She's also secretly trying to reach the seemingly catatonic adolescent son of a female friend, to no real progress. Although her story is majorly impactful on Jack's (or vice versa), she's really a pathetic character. I'm sure there are idiots like her responsible for the care of people who really need it in life, but I wanted to slap this bitch silly. Some majorly sick shit is being done on her watch, and she virtually does nothing to stop it.
Daniel Craig plays a fast-talking fellow patient of Jack's, who says he's in the looney bin for having tried to kill his wife a bunch of times, but who's really there because his wife left him and he went crazy and tried to starve himself to death. Craig kicked ass in his role. He's funny as hell, he adds some much needed light to a very dark story. But other than light, he adds absolutely nothing to the movie. Cut his role out entirely and you wouldn't miss him one iota. His story doesn't impact Jack's in any plot-significant way, and since the movie runs a little long, I'd almost advocate chopping him out entirely. Although a welcome distraction from the dark, his story is a distraction nevertheless.
All-in-all, I thought this movie was a good one that could maybe, possibly be tinkered with and made a little better. My flyer to get in called it a "psychological thriller," but I didn't think it was particularly thrilling. There's a lot of set-up to get out of the way in the beginning and I don't see any way of hurrying it up. But if you've got impatient moviegoers, it's going to be tough to get them to stick with it. The middle drags at times too, which is a shame. We know the guy's going to die really frickin' soon, and still I didn't feel any sense of urgency. I felt bad for the guy, but I really should have felt a sense of "Hurry! Figure it out!" The one thing I kept wondering why he didn't do was just to tell someone Jackie's real, full name when he got back to 1992. That was mentioned at his trial as being significant, that all he knew was Jackie's first name and nothing more. Well, now you know her name, go back and tell it! But that's never done. And the one thing that was a real sick mistake was turning Jack and Jackie's 2007 storyline into a romance. I'll be the first to say Keira's sizzling (stringy black hair or not), and who wouldn't fall for her? But we first meet Jackie as a five or six year old child. We see her frequently throughout the movie as a five or six year old child. That she's 15 years older in 2007 makes no difference. She's still that five or six year old child, and when Jack (who remains the same age throughout, whether he's in 1992 or 2007) suddenly starts jonesing for the 2007 year old version of Jackie, it just seems so wrong. If they cut out the romance entirely, it wouldn't hurt the movie one bit. Jackie would still want to help this guy. Jack would still need the help. And that would be that.
I was also a little unimpressed with the ending, which has one of those last second SURPRISE!!! Endings that's supposed to leave you gasping, "Whoa! What the fuck?" The aim is to be ambiguous, I think, and let every audience member decide what they think happened. What I think happened is that the ending very nearly negated everything that happened before, but that's just me. I don't know that they should change the ending. It'll certainly give moviegoers something to talk about with their friends on the way home.
I'd give it a B, maybe a B+ with some judicious editing and tweaks.
Hmmmmm... sounds interesting. With that cast, I can’t imagine I won’t see it. The description is as all over the place as the early draft seemed to be, and I’m curious how audiences will react to this one.
"Moriarty" out.
