"We'll take the tape off if you promise to stop talking about your damn Oscar."

causality paradox - NOUN:  A hypothetical effect that would result if an individual were to travel back in time and cause changes to the circumstances that led to his or her current actions. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000.)

Just throwing that out there.

The Jacket is a moderately trippy, fairly entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying science fiction thriller. I think. Adrien Brody stars as Jack Starks, a soldier in the first Gulf War (you know, the one that wasn’t about oil either) who receives a bullet to the head in exchange for a friendly smile. After his discharge, with nothing but a duffle bag and a shaky memory, he’s hitchhiking through Vermont when he meets a drunken mother (Kelly Lynch) and her frightened little girl. Later, he’s picked up by a guy who does Something Bad and leaves Jack to take the fall.

Since Jack can’t really remember what happened and he’s got that post-traumatic stress thingy, he’s sent to a hospital for the criminally insane and it’s there that the movie turns into “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Jacob’s Ladder.” Kris Kristofferson plays a doctor experimenting with a radical new therapy. It involves hallucinogens, a straightjacket and a few hours inside a morgue drawer, which I’m sure would make anybody feel better.

Yeah, Brody knows how to work it. All the goth chicks like a date at the cemetary.

What it does for Jack is allow him to travel through time into a future that he soon learns doesn’t include him. With the help of Keira Knightley as a woman from his past/future he has to figure out how and why he dies in the past . . . or future . . . well, it depends on how you look at it.

There are some things in The Jacket that worked for me. Director John Maybury, who has a reputation as a bit of an experimentalist, though I’ll confess that I’ve never seen any of his other films, actually manages to walk a pretty fine line here between straightforward thriller and totally-wack sci-fi. There’s enough artiness to keep things visually interesting (and maintain his avant-garde cred) but it never gets in the way of telling a story that, while flawed, holds together, at least in its own fashion. Cinematographer Peter Deming does some brilliant work with his bleak, winter palette.

Brody, who I feared was squandering his Oscar caché with the gawd-awful The Village, is exceptional here. With everything Jack goes through, it must have been tempting to overplay the anguish card but Brody gets it just right, I think. A couple of the supporting performances were excellent as well, including Jennifer Jason Leigh as a compassionate doctor and Daniel Craig as a fellow patient.

Keira Knightley, trying her damnedest to look like Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Unfortunately, Kristofferson seems like he’s reading his lines off a cue card. But he still fares better than Knightley. It’s a shame; I’ve always liked her before. But here the vivacious Brit is miscast as a drunk, despondent American and the result is just annoying. Knightley plays the role with a lot of mouth breathing, head tilting and a voice that sounds like she’s continually swallowing her own vomit.

Then there’s that flawed story. Come on, when the term “causality paradox” makes the dictionary, it’s time for screenwriters to start paying attention to it. I know that time travel is hard to pull off, logically, but would is it so much to ask for screenwriter Massy Tadjedin to at least try?

Here’s the bottom line: The Jacket is a smallish movie, not getting a lot of promotion and most of you probably weren’t planning to see it anyway. I say, go with that instinct. Unless you’re a die-hard science fiction buff or Adrien Brody fan, there’s nothing to see here. Move along.

Gorilla Pants rating: 1.5 out of 4 bananas