Starring: Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Daniel Craig (I)

7 out of 10

The Jacket is a completely competent, fairly involving film, that you'll be pleasantly surprised with one evening on late-night cable.

Involving time travel, hospital restraints (the straightjacket of the title) and the Gulf war, The Jacket is very, very reminiscent of Jacob's Ladder, maybe too much so.

Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, a soldier during Desert Storm who is shot in the head, though he amazingly survives the injury. Nine months later Jack has been released from the army and is a wandering vet, hitchhiking out on the highway in Vermont. He meets Jean (Kelly Lynch) and her daughter, Jackie (Laura Marano), parked on the side of the road. Jean is blasted out of her gourd and her truck won't start. Jack jumpstarts the vehicle, and gives Jackie his dogtags, but Jean is suspicious of his motives and drives off without him. Jack is later picked up by a crazy yokel who shoots a policeman and frames Jack.

When Jack regains consciousness he finds himself being railroaded through the court system, winding up in Alpine Grove, an institution for the criminally insane. The head doctor is Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson, extra crinkly) who, as part of Jack's rehabilitation, laces him up in a straight jacket, loads him up with psychotic drugs and shoves him in a corpse drawer. Jack's poor minds flashes back on all sorts of nasty things, like the war, the shooting of the policeman, until he somehow teleports himself into the future, 2006.

There he meets the grown-up (or grown-up enough) version of Jackie (Keira Knightley). She still has the dog tags from the helpful Mr. Sparks, though she doesn't remember him. At first she thinks he's completely insane. She even knows the date that Jack Sparks died from a blow to the head in a psychiatric hospital in 1991. After some thorough convincing, Jack gets her to believe that he's come from the past and that she has to help discover how he died because his past self, back in the corpse closet, is only a few days away from getting that blow to the head.

Though time travel plots always seem to have gaping holes in logic, this one is so brisk, and initially so disturbing that you don't ruminate on them for too long. The Jacket sports a fine supporting cast as well, including Jennifer Jason Leigh at her most sympathetic in eons, as the doctor who takes up Stark's cause, Daniel Craig as his Alpine confidant, and a nearly unrecognizable Brad Renfro as the crazy driver who picks him up near the beginning of the film.

The sullen winterscapes are nicely utilized by director John Maybury and cinematographer Peter Deming (who always does nice work, it seems).

The Jacket does turn into "Touched by a Brody" near the end but, after all that claustrophobic suffering, it's a welcome respite and you'll welcome it when you catch it on that late night cable channel.