Jumper is the first movie director Doug Liman hasn't been able to save with his amazing way with action sequences. Blame its glaring inconsistencies, the overuse of one nifty special effect that renders the picture's centrepiece an anticlimax, and a passel of squeezed-off performances as truncated--as brief--as the rest of the picture feels. It's over before it begins, wasn't much while it lasted, and is so brazen in its abuse of internal logic that the only audience that would see it will be irritated by it. Based on a Steven Gould cult novel I read years ago (but not long ago enough to love it), its high concept is that there are genetic anomalies among us who are capable of teleporting anywhere they've been before; the catch is that a group of witch hunters is eager to kill them because they're abominations before God. It's Highlander, essentially, or any vampire movie, a skylark about rock-star bandits that swaps immortality for the ability to zip around at will--with only some party-pooping senior citizen (it's snow-on-the-roof Samuel L. Jackson this time around, playing Illuminati-cum-Homeland Security bogie Roland) around to spoil the fun. The obligatory hot chick is dead-eyed Rachel Bilson as Millie, trading not so much up from Zach Braff in The Last Kiss as sideways to Hayden Christensen's protag "jumper" David. Millie and David have loved one another since high school, a misleadingly fun prologue tells us: what follows is about an hour of deadening, repetitive, useless nonsense that fails, completely, to provide a universe in which this stuff makes any kind of impact, even as escapism.

Jump from David as a teen bank robber to David as a globetrotting lothario to David as a hunted man-of-action, forced to team up with McJumper Griffin (Jamie Bell), who takes it upon himself to teach David (and us) the brief history of Jumpers vs. Paladins. Paladins, it seems, have dedicated their lives and their electric lassos to the destruction of Jumpers. The point? Lost on me, I'm afraid, unless it's all an excuse for Liman to choreograph devilishly complicated sequences in which David teleports around his apartment for a bit before circumstance drives him back into the arms of his childhood sweetie to the tune of an anthem by The Fray. That's the problem, you know, that there's all this sound and fury employed for these assholes to do the most prosaic things. It's a far cry from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where Liman was able to combine action and romance in a way that, seriously, I don't know anyone else is as capable of doing anymore. Alas, Jumper is delighted-with-itself crap, a fusillade of noise and digital pyrotechnics not held together by a threadbare, badly-conceived script and slack performances that betray actors asked to play third fiddle to a mainframe. It takes a special actor to overcome the bondage imposed upon him by meticulous effects choreography--how many times does Christensen have to prove he's not that guy before they give up trying?

You could say that Jackson is slumming here as the flat, inexplicable villain except that Jackson has only ever been in four or five good movies, with Kill Bill probably counting as two. Roland has no real motive except to function as the heavy just as Millie has no function but to be the girlfriend just as Griffin has no purpose but to be the rapscallion just as David has no function except to be the hero. Just as Jumper has no function but to waste everyone's time and money. There's a moment where it appears as though these Jumpers are indestructible; there are effects shots that suggest that every teleportation causes severe seismic distress (meaning David would be moving every couple of days--or that he has a hell of a contractor); and there are countless sequences where everyone smarter than the movie--I should just say "everyone"--wonders why the Jumpers don't use their powers to kill their tormentors instead of fucking around with them interminably like asshole cats. (I should just say "cats.") Jumper is genuinely awful, the more so because Liman is a gifted director and this particular high concept is one that could've been handled with some grace and intelligence. With no gravity, no tension, no stakes, no surprises, no themes, and, most damnably, no ambition beyond mere adaptation to speak of, this is the first real disappointment of 2008, and it's a doozy.-Walter Chaw

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Published: February 14, 2008