REVIEW: Jumper



“From the Visionary Director of The Bourne Identity”, so reads the promotional tagline on one of the pre-release posters for Doug Liman’s Jumper. Call it my unremitting critical cynicism but when it comes to ‘visionary directors’, the name Liman, seems strangely out of place with the likes of Welles, Hitchcock, Bergman, Kurosawa, Marker, or Fellini. Overblown marketing jargon notwithstanding, if this ineptly bland, and tediously uninviting piece of cinema is what passes for ‘visionary’ these days, then so help us all.

The premise of Jumper is, at least in theory, not without its creative possibilities. David (Hayden Christensen) has the ability to ‘teleport’ himself across the globe, a skill he discovers in his teens after a brush with death that sees him transported from an icy river to the aisles of a local library. However, rather than press his ‘powers’ into the service of ‘good’ (as in a traditional superhero narrative like Spider-Man), David spends his time in a hedonistic haze: robbing banks, picking up women in London, surfing the beaches of Fiji, and sunbaking atop the Sphinx in Egypt.

And therein lies one of Jumper’s most explicit flaws – it’s hard to feel any empathy whatsoever for a guy who’s little more than a self-anointed yuppie, performed by Christensen with the charismatic charm of a disconnected telephone. The film’s narrative is further weakened by its reticence to engage with any kind of exploration of the reasons behind David’s ability (childhood trauma?), or the necessity of photographs and site-memory that enable his jumps (such as that explored in the time-travel themed La Jetee, and more recently in The Butterfly Effect).

Even the film’s central conflict, a supposed ‘war’ between ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Paladins’ (a group of grey uniformed hunters attempting to eradicate Jumpers) is whitewashed amidst the constant location swapping, and an underwhelming romantic sub-plot between David and his childhood crush, Millie (Rachel Billson). It’s hard to imagine how Liman could have got it all so wrong here, particularly after his good effort with The Bourne Identity, and with a scriptwriting team (David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls), whose previous individual credits include the deftly penned Batman Begins and Fight Club.

The only glimmer of light in this otherwise forgettable flick is the all-too-fleeting presence of Jamie Bell as Griffin, a Jumper with a serious grudge against the Paladin, Roland (played by a ludicrously white-haired Samuel L. Jackson). Resonating with the scruffy appeal of a young Ewan MacGregor, Bell’s performance shines above the rest of the cast, and hopefully points towards more leading roles in the future.

Facebooktwitterredditmail
Filed under : Review

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a reply


*