Riding the morgue express

OK, here it is: Straitjacket and time travel go hand in hand. Yeah, right.
By PHIL VILLARREAL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Every once in a while, it's nice to watch a movie that makes absolutely no sense.
Watching "The Jacket" is like being pushed into a swimming pool with all your clothes on or hitting the curb on your bike and tumbling onto a patch of soft grass. While it's happening, it's a whole lot unsettling and a little terrifying. Kinda fun, too, but you wouldn't want to try it again or recommend anyone else do so.
"The Jacket" is exactly such a movie. It's absolutely crazy, with pinball cutting and tons of surreal shots that zoom into the eyeballs of star Adrien Brody, who plays time-traveling mental patient Jack Starks. Most time-travel stories are pocked with plot holes and spells of logic aversion, but they try at least a little to cover up their contradictions with explanations.
This movie from British director John Maybury, though, makes no such effort.
If Maybury had directed "Back to the Future," Marty McFly would not have had a flux capacitator-equipped DeLorean. He would have pedaled through time on a Schwinn, honking his horn one time for each year he wanted to go forward.
Actually, the Schwinn would have made more sense than Jack's method, which is to get drugged up, straitjacketed and shoved inside a morgue locker for hours.
An early scene shows Jack rescuing a kid during the Gulf War in 1991, then suffering an injury, leading to, according to Jack's narration, his death.
Things change
Then he wakes up in a hospital, gets better and goes AAA on the vehicle of a mother and daughter who are stranded on the side of the road. The little girl is impressed and asks for Jack's dog tags. Mom is strung out, and angrily tells Jack to shove off.
Then Jack hitches a ride from an ex-con, and a cop pulls the men over. Flash forward to a trial scene, and Jack is acquitted of killing the cop by reason of insanity. The grisly Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson) gives Jack an experimental rehab treatment that involves the not-quite FDA-approved sedative, straitjacket and morgue-locker job.
Becker's motto: "You can't break something that's already broken." Compared to this guy, Nurse Ratched was a coddling angel of medical ethics.
The time-travel ability is quite a consolation prize for such a cruel treatment. Common logic dictates that if you're ever lucky enough to travel through time, the first thing you do is go to 2007 and hook up with Keira Knightley, and that's exactly what Jack does.
Knightley plays Jackie, the little stranded girl, all grown up on Christmas Eve '07, who meets Jack in a parking lot. Soon they're dating at regular intervals, but a relationship is tough to maintain when one of the parties has a tendency to suddenly vanish, and then may only reappear when his insane doctor from years ago decides to lock him away again. Things get really heavy when Jack learns in 2007 that he died on New Year's Eve 1992.
So does that explain it well enough? Probably not. But then, the movie doesn't explain itself very well, either. The loopy leaps and nonsensical narrative are made up for by solid actors trying hard, stylish camerawork and a screenplay with slivers of bright ideas that don't quite coalesce. At least the film is never as dull as being stuck inside a morgue locker, unless, of course, you're stuck in a morgue locker with time-travel abilities.