The Jacket premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2005, and was released in theaters in the United States by Warner Independent Pictures on March 4, 2005. It grossed $21.1 million on a budget of $28.5 million and received mixed reviews from critics.
Back in the United States, he is blamed for the death of a policeman and incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane. Subject to experimental treatments there, which involve him being shut inside a morgue casket while tied in a straitjacket, he eventually learns to travel through time and is able to offer help to various people.
The Jacket shares its title, and the idea of a person experiencing extra-corporeal time-travel while in an intolerably tight straitjacket, with a 1915 novel by Jack London. The novel was published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket and in the United States of America as The Star Rover. Director Maybury has said that the film is "loosely based on a true story that became a Jack London story".[4] The true story is that of Ed Morrell, who told London about San Quentin prison's inhumane use of tight straitjackets.[5]
The Jacket opened on March 4, 2005, and grossed $2,723,682 (~$4.08 million in 2023) on opening weekend, with a peak release of 1,331 theaters in the United States. The film went on to gross $6,303,762 domestically, for a total of $21,126,225 worldwide.[3]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 44% of 162 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "The Jacket is a case of creepy style over substance."[6]OnMetacritic, it had a score of 44% based on reviews from 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[7]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two out of four stars and wrote: "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."[8]
^ abClarke, Donald (13 May 2005). "Full Mental Jacket". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 11 October 2012. Retrieved 20 December 2009. Quotes director Maybury: "'I know you think it is a load of Hollywood nonsense,' he says amiably, 'but it is in fact loosely based a true story that became a Jack London story.'"
^Morrell, Ed. (2018). The 25th Man: The Strange Story of Ed. Morrell, the Hero of Jack London's Star Rover. Forgotten Books. ISBN978-0243119004.
