THE JACKET is a compelling time-travel movie, in the vein of THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT. As long as you keep in mind that once you've time travelled to the future YOU ARE THERE. I doesn't matter what happened in the past, even if you presumably died sometime in the past after you time travelled beyond that point. As long as you stick to this line of reasoning, the movie is much easier to follow. John Stark (Adrian Brody) is a Gulf War veteran who was shot in the head and had his memory erased. A year later he's wandering the country and comes across a mother and daughter whose car has stalled. The mother (Kelly Lynch) is extremely drunk but the little girl is appreciative of Stark's help, especially when he's able to start their car, as it's Winter and freezing outside.Soon after, he gets a ride from a guy who kills a policeman when he's pulled over. Stark is knocked unconscious and the man plants the gun near him. Stark is caught and tried for murder-but because he can't clearly remember anything, they sentence him to an asylum for the criminally insane.He spends years there-during which time he's used as a guinea pig in a doctor's experiment. He's put into a straightjacket, injected with a psychotropic drug and locked in a drawer for hours at a time. But what this drug does, in combination with his damaged brain, is allow him to travel to the future, where he meets that little girl grown up (Kyra Knightely). He spends time with her-and she helps him find out why he died (in the past) at the Asylum, so he can hopefully prevent it. He eventually is able to go back in time (before his arrest) and prevent an accident that killed the girl's mother, so he can change her life for the better.THE JACKET is a weird, unpredictable movie, with a very dark tone, good performances and a unique story.