The Jacket
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"When you die, there's only one thing you want to happen. You wanna come back."
—Jack Starks
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The Jacket is a 2005 independent film starring Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. Jack Starks (Brody) is a gulf war veteran that survived a nearly fatal gunshot wound to the head. Upon returning home, Jack meets a young girl and her mother stranded on the side of the road. He helps the pair by fixing their car. Later, Jack hitches a ride with a young man headed north, but when the two men are pulled over by a police officer, Jack spontaneously suffers an amnesiac black out.
When he awakes, he is in court and is being held responsible for the murder of the police officer. The jury determines he is not guilty on account of insanity, and Jack is locked away in Alpine Groves, an asylum for the criminally insane. There, Jack undergoes experimental treatment for his supposed mental illness, and he begins experiencing strange visions of the future. In these visions, he encounters a grown version of the girl he previously met (Knightley), and he learns startling truths of upcoming events.
Overtime Jack learns to control and manipulate his visions so he can uncover more of the mystery surrounding Alpine Groves, his alleged mental illness, and the history of the girl he encountered. With this knowledge, Jack sets out to right several wrongs in the lives around him, and to potentially find freedom from the asylum. Time is running out, however, as he uncovers an unexpected side-effect to the experiments...
- Dreaming of Things to Come: The experimental drug and treatment apparently gives Jack these sort of dreams.
- Dying Dream: One of the alternate endings uses this, showing that Jack dies shortly after waking in the army medical tent.
- Used partially in the actual ending, where Jack is dying from his pre-ordained trauma to the head (turns out to be from slipping in the hospital parking lot) during his last future visit/vision/whatever, where he is able to see that Jackie turns out much better with her mother alive.
- Fake American: Keira Knightley.
- And also Daniel Craig in a serious case of Hey, It's That Guy!.
- Karma Houdini: The guy who picked up Jack while hitchhiking and then killed the cop (landing Jack in the hospital in the first place) is last seen drinking at a bar, seemingly off the hook. Oddly enough, his actor, Brad Renfro, died 3 years after the movie came out.
- Mind Screw: The entire movie.
- Villainous Breakdown: Damon, the mean orderly, ultimately ends up a patient at the hospital.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Subverted. Jack appears to change the future with his actions, but Jackie also seems to be aware of the alternate timeline where her mom died.