Jacket, The

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

The first great film of 2005.

The Hollywood Reporter Duane Byrge

Admittedly, The Jacket is not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but filmmaker John Maybury has forged a mesmerizing mindblower.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The result is what you might call a mass-audience art film. It doesn't entirely succeed, but it's certainly a change from today's standard mysteries and horror movies.

Chicago Tribune Kevin Williams

A gripping drama that will leave thoughtful cinemagoers wrestling with basic Big Questions.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This movie probably falls within the purview of a "love it/hate it" subgenre of the psychological thriller.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Director John Maybury has a feel for shock rhythms, and he's skillful at keeping you guessing, but after a while you want your questions to cohere into compelling answers, and in The Jacket they don't, quite.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Adrien Brody is cornering the market on roles where he's hunted, haunted and under-nourished.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The Jacket is a confused attempt at headiness that feels like a poor man's "Memento."

Empire Kim Newman

A gripping, affecting, strange movie -- but oddly, it's just like too many other gripping, affecting, strange movies we've seen recently.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Intermittently compelling but unavoidably improbable.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

The director's work is suitably unnerving, but leaves one feeling beaten senseless by reel two. When the hero's well-earned moment of clarity finally arrives, most will likely be too numbed out to care, despite the best efforts of Brody, an actor too vividly alive to be wasting his time playing dead.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

Maybury's attempt at a more mainstream movie is really just a simple love story cloaked in a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

Film Threat Eric Campos

You'll either walk away with a headache,or praising filmmaker John Maybury for his unique narrative...and it is unique, but in my eyes, it's also a big giant mess.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Though shot for maximum moodiness by the gifted Peter Deming ("Mulholland Drive"), the movie straps you in for a head trip that promises hallucinatory wonders but delivers the same old Hollywood formula with sugar on top.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It draws you into its grim and mysterious world through the first half of the movie, then falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's pretty stupid, although it's never exactly boring.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

You can sense an impulse toward a better film, and Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley certainly take it seriously, but the time-travel whiplash effect sets in, and it becomes, as so many time travel movies do, an exercise in early entrances, late exits, futile regrets.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Memo to screenwriters cranking out murky existential thrillers: Do not have various characters repeat on several occasions: "I know this doesn't make any sense."

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Doesn't really go anywhere or amount to anything - a fatal flaw in a time-travel movie designed not only to keep you guessing, but to build genuine suspense as well.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.

Slate David Edelstein

Begins too cruelly and ends too sappily but holds you somewhere between the two extremes until the semisweet finale.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Visually, The Jacket has a lot of flash, but it hardly compensates for the fuzzy story.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Still, the central mystery remains effective and compelling for most of the film, until it becomes clear that it's all image and no intent.

Variety Scott Foundas

A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."

New York Post Kyle Smith

The characters are so flat and the dialogue so dull you expect it to be one of those movies whose existence is justified by a big final twist. But it's three days after the screening, and still no twist. Maybe it's coming in the mail?

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

If claustrophobia's your style, The Jacket is a perfect fit.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The Jacket is doing nothing but sampling elements of "Jacob's Ladder," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Memento" without offering more than hackneyed solutions, including a rather cheesy conclusion.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

[Brody's] mannered performance helps downgrade this picture from a middling sci-fi film to a bad, borderline-camp sci-fi film.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

As bad movies go, The Jacket belongs to a relatively rare but extremely intriguing/irritating genus.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

In this case, the adage would go something like "material, material, material," also known as the Nicolas Cage Rule: Good acting can't overcome bad taste.