TNMC

Purely on a whim I did something generally against my rules of conduct, which is buying a DVD for a previously unseen movie.  Why buy when Netflix will provide it easily for me?  If the movie sucks, $20 has just been saved.
But something about the ads for Jumper caught my attention.  It's hard to say why exactly but while on a trip to Wal-Mart with the family, I snagged the case off a display and took it home.  Perhaps I saw the list of people involved and wondered "how bad could it be?"  It has Samuel L. Jackson.  That's usually enough to sell me on a movie.  Toss in screenwriters David Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins) and Jim Uhls (Fight Club) and my interest is definitely piqued.  Finally, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Swingers) and it doesn't seem so crazy to buy the movie sight unseen.  Of course, the reason I don't do this normally is that I have said a few thousand times that even really talented people can make crap.

So is it crap?  No.  I actually rather enjoyed the movie.  It is by no means a work of pure genius but it is very entertaining and that's really all I expected from it.  Done.  Thank you folks, you've been great.  Good night!

No, that's no right.  This movie may be as shallow as a runway model but that doesn't mean we can't dig a bit deeper into it.  The very simple plot is that young awkward teen David (Max Thierot initially, Hayden Christensen the rest of the way) discovers that he can teleport himself anywhere he wants.  Well, not exactly anywhere.  He seems to need some visual familiarity with the location before he can jump to it.  But that's mostly beside the point.  What it really amounts to is an escape fantasy taken to the extreme.  Rather than deal with his tough life, David simply jumps out of it and uses his power to give himself a life of great freedom and luxury.  What kid wouldn't want that?  With such a power there is no responsibility and no sacrifice.  As you might suspect, that could annoy other people.  And sure enough, Sam Jackson arrives in the form of Roland, leader of a group known as the Paladins.  You old D&D geeks will immediately recognize such a designation makes him a tight ass religious crusader, and you would be right on the money.  Roland and his ilk don't like jumpers (yes, plural) because they can do anything, which is God's job.  You could make the argument that if God was doing his job, somebody else wouldn't have to take up the task, but that's a discussion for a different day. 

The rest of the movie is essentially a series of chases.  Along the way David tries to reconnect with his childhood flame Millie (Rachel Bilson) and she quickly becomes the apparently required damsel in distress.  The writers obviously wanted to give David something of an arc as he goes from shallow and carefree to slightly less carefree and mildly concerned with others, so he needs someone to care about.  Sadly, Millie is basically a placeholder for an actual character we might give a damn about, but she sure is purty so we can care about that instead.  Weakly developed characters are often the major failing of summer action movies and this one is no different.  Christensen will get unfairly beat up for being wooden as he attempts to fill in his character.  He has a lot of nice little moments where he puts some flesh on the role without any dialog but he's on his own here.  The script doesn't help him much. 

Things really get in gear when another jumper appears to clue David in on the whole jumper/Paladin thing.  Griffin (Jamie Bell) is the best character and Bell takes advantage, chewing the hell out of the scenery at every opportunity.  Griffin is the angry jumper who actively hunts the Paladins.  That turns the chase into more of a battle and also gives David someone to bounce his newly developing morals off of.

Okay, enough with the deep thought stuff.  I've grumbled about the weaknesses but the movie flies above all that with nervous jumpy energy that matches its protaganists.  It leaps all over the world, using flashy effects cleverly to really play with the idea of teleportation.  The action sequences are pretty clever.  It's hard to get to upset about the movie's weaknesses when it doesn't bother to stop and let them become a problem.  Sure, I wondered for a moment why a guy who doesn't even have to bother walking much should be so ripped, but then something neat happened and I stopped wondering about it.  About the only thing I couldn't let go was Sam Jackson's bizarre hair. Okay, the spectacularly wasted Diane Lane character and non-ending grated on the nerves a bit too, but mostly because instead of something cool happening to distract me on those last two issues, the credits came up.  So that was a bit of a problem.

It seems like I've done a lot of complaining here but really I thought the movie was good fun.  There are a lot worse ways to spend time with a DVD, I assure you.

- This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it made it all the way through the review without a single Star Wars reference.  He's pretty proud of that.