Jumper

February 14, 2008

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 90 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Maybe invisibility. I’d like to be a Human Babel Fish; able to communicate in all languages. In JUMPER, the superpower is teleportation.

David (Hayden Christensen) discovers in high school he can *BAMF*, like that blue guy in X-MEN. He leaves home, steals money from bank vaults, sets himself up in a fancy apartment in New York City, then spends his days jumping from place to place, surfing in Fiji, seducing a woman in a bar in London, sunning himself atop the Sphinx in Egypt.

He eventually meets up with a Brit Jumper named Griffin. What little exposition there is comes from him, which is unfortunate, because he talks with such a mush-mouth. For example, we learn that Jumpers have been around for centuries, and there is an age-old group that hunts them called the Plabbleblabbles. Actually, they’re called the Paladins, but it took about the sixth time he said it for me to be able to understand what the heck he was saying.

Now, a regular movie of this ilk might have given us some scenes of them discovering an ancient temple with carvings on the wall of Paladins chasing Jumpers. Or maybe a Medieval illuminated manuscript. No time, this movie has to get to more quick cuts of Jumping. So we just get, “Some guys hunt us.”

The main guy hunting them is Samuel Jackson. He’s kind of like the guy he played in UNBREAKABLE. He’s jealous of people with a superpower, and so he’s going to try to kill them.

Frankly, the protagonist is so unlikeable, I was rooting for Samuel Jackson.

Extraordinarily, nobody involved has the slightest curiosity about why there are people who can teleport. There’s no attempt at any sort of technobabble. I’d at least have liked them to bring in some Heisenberg-type character and then he could draw some equations on a blackboard and say, “I’m uncertain, in principle!”

Rachel Bilson plays a love interest.

Diane Lane makes a brief appearance, and is lovely as always.

This movie has nice special effects, but that’s about it. A protagonist who’s distinctly unlikeable; his fellow Jumper who’s also not very likeable but at least is a bit of a smart-ass, but should learn to enunciate. There’s no sort of “with great power comes great responsibility” lesson here. They like Jumping, they like stealing stuff, and they think they’re entitled. And there’s a complete lack of any explanation of any of this.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 2 Stars, Diane Lane, Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Samuel L. Jackson, Theatrical