Keira Knightley: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Jackie - The Jacket (2005)

When I talked about A Dangerous Method, I said that Knightley was the best or most redeeming aspect of an otherwise disappointing film. In the case of The Jacket, it is the other way around, in that she is the most disappointing or problematic factor in a film which deserves a lot more recognition.

Based loosely on Jack London's novel of the same name (released as The Star Rover in the US), The Jacket stars Adrian Brody as Jack Starks, a veteran of the first Gulf War coming home to Vermont after recovering from a head wound. Suffering from amnesia, he befriends a young girl and winds up in an asylum after being found not guilty by insanity of murdering a policeman. Through an experimental treatment, he time travels to 2007, where he meets an adult Jackie (Knightley) and begins to piece together what happened on the day they first met. The Jacket is a neat little self-contained time travel film, the sort of story that Richard Kelly wishes he could write (more on him later). Brody is very good and director John Maybury gives the story a fittingly disorientated sensibility, drawing on Adrian Lyne's work on Jacob's Ladder. The one weak link, however, is Knightley: her American accent is completely unconvincing and her performance feels overly choreographed and stilted. She's not enough to spoil the film completely, but her extended presence in the later scenes distracts us from Brody's excellent work in the lead.