JUMPER - It Will Have You Bounding Out of The Theater, Despite Its Flaws
I circled the date on the calendar when I heard about this movie. A sci-fi flick involving teleporting humans that are hunted, directed by Doug Liman? It's a natural...'cept for it having
Hayden Christensen and Samuel L(oves to yell expletives) Jackson. I've heard good things about Christensen's chops in non-Star-Wars movies and know that there is still a great actor somewhere hidden in Jackson, but recent history from the two hasn't made me too confident.
I basically went into this movie trying to be unbiased, but clearly expecting I'd either get a really good flick or a really bad one. I just couldn't completely keep expectations out of it.
What I got was somewhere on the "good" side of middling.
The movie treats us to a bit of an origin for our protagonist, David Rice (played during these scenes by Max Thieriot). It establishes a little bit of everything that is important for the character, but not enough of one single thing to truly resonate. For the kind of movie this turned out to be, you really could have dropped almost all of it for as much good as it did. But it was brief enough that you didn't feel like you were hurt by its failure to accomplish all it desired.
Moving on, Hayden did a good job establishing the lazy, cocky way the adult David got to live his life. The life of leisure he has been able to afford himself through the somewhat unethical use of his abilities get quickly established and Christensen does well in making it clear that he is very at ease with his travels. It isn't long before we see it come crashing down around him.
Samuel L. Jackson acquits himself nicely as the heavy in this movie. It seems to be a role well suited for him, as he does best with spots that allow him to be intimidating and speak sternly. Makeup in movies are not his friend. The shockingly white hair is unconvincing from any angle, but none more so than when he is walking away from the camera. There is a "made for 3am on Cinemax" quality to the hair piece from that angle. Great sin? No, but it did serve to pull me out of the movie occasionally. Due to this, his best work here is with close-ups where he dominates the screen or during the action scenes where everything happens too fast and furious for the hair to be a distraction.
Jackson's character is a "paladin" and part of a group that hunts all humans with the ability to "jump" around the globe. There's some religiously fanatical idea that only God should be able to pop around the world, so all "jumpers" must be killed. This is, of course, where the conflict comes into play in our movie.
The conflict sets up both the weakest and strongest parts of the movie.
David's relationship with Milli (played by Rachel Bilson) is just a failure on the screen. David had a crush on her eight years earlier, while they were schoolmates. She's tied into the first time he realized he had his power to teleport. After running away from home based on the strength of his "jumping" ability, he never looks back towards her until he is on the run. While living the high life, he's become quite a "player" with the ladies. Yet, with nothing much to go on, the viewer is asked to buy into her being the love of his life at many times. The movie takes shortcuts all over the place here, with her writing off the fact that most people thought he was dead and jumping into bed with him so quickly. It strains the suspension of disbelief even more than the concepts of natural born teleporters and portable wormholes.
The indictment of the relationship is not meant in anyway to reflect on Mr. Christensen's or Ms. Bilson's acting abilities. They simply either weren't given the material to work with or it was left on the cutting room floor. Given that Tom Hulce is credited as playing a character I swear never appeared on screen, the cutting room floor is a likely suspect.
The best thing to come along in this film, however, was the character of Griffin (played by Jamie Bell). His character was used to deliver the many of the best action sequences and all of the comic relief. Some of you may remember him from The Chumscrubber, if your tastes include the occasional independent flick. In this film, he really stands out as the best character and, possibly, best actor. He might be the beneficiary of having a character that is meant to remain somewhat mysterious and aloof. Whereas Christensen suffers from his character having just enough laid out about his character to be a hair shy of useful and Jackson's character never truly has his motivation built up, all we need to know about Bell's could be summed up in a sentence.
One of the biggest shames of this film, in my estimation, is the wastes of Diane Lane and Michael Rooker. These two, having honed their craft so well, deserved more than the meager scraps they were given to give even a hit of the complicated relationships they were meant to have had with David (playing his mother and father, respectively). Rooker's role is another candidate for having been lopped off in the cutting room, while nothing but poor final scripting can explain how flat Lane's relationship with Christensen's character was at the end.
Cutting script and film is one of the biggest faults here. Coming in at about an hour and a half in the age of two hour films would seem to leave no reasonable excuse for developing characters and motivations so poorly. If the film wanted to come through as anything better than a special effects popcorn movie, that extra time was sorely needed.
Two alarming things about this film, separate from what actually happened on the screen, is the apparent intent to capitalize on the heat behind "comic book" films and to make this into a franchise (complete with Liman sending the credits off with a shrill electronic song). While not a pre-existing "comic book" property, there was a prequel published in comic book form and the characters make strong references to Marvel Team-Up comics of yesteryear. Drawing from that, one can guess that sticking to "comic book" conventions might be partially to blame for how shallow different areas of development were in the film. The connection between the intended couple was largely taken for granted, the "villains" were just part of some mysterious organization that made them bad, and the two "heroes" were largely orphaned in some manner that made them who they are today. The concept is interesting enough to support another movie or two, but not if each dip into the well is going to be this shallow.
I know that you have to be wondering how I can say this movie came on the good side of middling with the way I've described it. It's simple: I judge based on the movie it appeared to try to be. Given its obvious flaws, it would seem that there was a conscious decision to let it rest on concept, name actors, and special effects. I walked out of the theater feeling I had gotten my money's worth, even if it had some glaring flaws. Christensen and Jackson did what was asked of them (with flare, even), Bell was a revelation in the role, and Bilson did the best she could when saddled with an unbelievable "damsel-in-distress" role. All of their performances work best if you can manage to check your brain at the door and just try to enjoy the ride. Putting some distance between having seen, let's say, THERE WILL BE BLOOD or NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN might help, as well.
