"Jacob's Ladder" and 1965's "Mirage" are more believable and entertaining.

Rating: 5/10 (21 February 2010)

This is the kind of thriller Scorsese tried to make where the viewer is lead through the plot from the trauma induced, delusional perspective of the main character, only there's too many flashback distractions to make any sense of it all. The flashbacks are what gave away the end for me. I knew it pretty early on in the movie.
However, the premise is fascinating from another perspective they only touched upon which is the idea of how anyone could be brainwashed into thinking and doing anything if given the proper support system much like what happened in "The Manchurian Candidate". I actually thought that was where it was going.
What's not explained in the movie is from where the main character is deriving his delusions while participating in the mental hospital's roll playing therapy experiment. What induced the delusion to roll play as a US Marshal? Why choose to be a US Marshal? Was this his occupation before the actual trauma occurred that caused his psychosis?
What was the seed of information that caused him to delude specifics like imagining finding a former doctor hiding out in a cave whose escaping a delusion of her own. Why would shooting your wife for drowning the children cause you to make up all that stuff? Usually in movies there's a seed of reality and logic that starts the spiral downward toward paranoid delusional psychosis this guy was experiencing. To many holes in the logic for me to suspend my disbelief.
Great idea for a movie, though. It's just clumsily executed.