A hop, skip and a “Jump” from being worth it
“Jumper” is a movie that was made solely to entertain its audiences, but it even fails miserably at that. There are so many things wrong with “Jumper,” I just don’t know where to start. It’s one of those movies that defies its own logic and is fine with it. It’s a movie where you’ll sit there watching, not being able to help give suggestions to make the movie more plausible, like: Why in the world is that guy using a giant flamethrower? Couldn’t he just teleport behind someone with a small gun and get the job done twice as fast?
“Jumper” is about special people who can teleport anywhere on Earth. David Rice (Hayden Christensen, “Awake”) finds out around the age of 15 that he has this special jumping ability (at 15 David is actually played by a different actor, who is just a superfluous actor because Christensen looks like he’s 15 anyway). He loves Millie, Rachel Bilson of “OC” fame, who is also played by a younger actress when she’s in her earlier years, even though she could pull off being in high school too.
Sorry, all that is beside the point. We meet up with David eight years down the road from his first jump. He’s living the high life in a snazzy apartment, traveling all over the world. He lives life without consequences. At one moment he’s in England in bed with a girl, and before the post-coital cuddling, he has jumped to Fiji to go surfing. Somewhere in the movie it is explained that the jumpers have to have been to a place before they can jump there, but the movie never takes time to explain if David actually went to all these places before jumping there. But that’s the least of its problems.
As the jumpers are jumping here and there and everywhere, no one seems to notice except one awestruck kid in an airport. Everyone else is completely oblivious to people appearing and disappearing around them. Sometimes when jumpers jump, they create a lot of dust, noise and even giant craters in the ground. Then sometimes they don’t. It’s all very confusing, I know.
Now introduce Roland (Samuel L. Jackson “Pulp Fiction), who hunts jumpers. He’s a member of the Palidans. Why are Palidans hunting jumpers? We don’t really know. They tell us they’ve been doing it since medieval times, but there’s never any back story to let us if that is true. It’s all very arbitrary.
Bilson is shockingly bad. She’s never sure if she should act surprised, afraid or mad, so she does them all about the same. Her character is only introduced to be a damsel in distress.
There’s a very heavy-handed bit of foreshadowing in the movie that once you hear you can leave, because you’ll already know what’s going to happen. The fights are ridiculous. In a movie where these jumpers can move rapidly from one point to another and the people chasing them can’t, why don’t the jumpers have guns? It would seem logical that if you appeared and disappeared firing a gun everywhere nothing would be able to stop you. But, alas, their weapons of choice are knives, baseball bats and flame throwers.
“Jumper” has no substance to it. There’s no story of worth here, just an exercise in special effects. Here is a movie that is so ridiculously acted, written and directed that you’ll wish you had the ability to teleport out of the theater.
Grade: D-