Jumper (2008)

Jumper (2008) Movie Review

Jumper (2008)The premise of the story is that a teenage boy called David Rice (Christiansen) discovers he has the ability to teleport himself anywhere in the world at any time. He runs away to escape his abusive father (Rooker) and a hum drum average life in middle America and uses his power to ‘borrow’ large sums of money from bank vaults undetected, thus being able to afford a worry free and privileged life.

Fast forward several years later and David begins to realise there is more going on than meets the eye when he finds himself confronted by Roland (Jackson), a Paladin who have been responsible for hunting and killing Jumpers in a war that has raged for hundreds of years.

Caught up in the middle of this war are David’s old high school crush Millie (Bilson), another Jumper called Griffin (Bell) and David’s estranged mother Mary (Lane) Indeed, it looks good….slick and stylish with great visual effects, but that’s sadly one of the few things that impressed me about this movie as it turns out to be all style and little substance.

The pace of the film is slow to build as the threadbare plot is so transparent it doesn’t allow for any kind of suspense and the story itself is laboured with no real character or timeline development. This means that by the time any real adrenalin kicks in and things start to happen, you’re still none the wiser as to why everything is happening and to be honest I nearly got past caring.

Although looking good and brooding all the way through the film (which i’m sure will be popular with teenage girls all around the world) Hayden Christiansen fails to really get under the skin of his character, staying sadly wooden and one dimensional in a part which is supposed to chart the course of a young man who starts off as a self absorbed, arrogant loner who realises there are things and people in the world worth risking his own life to protect. Likewise Samuel L Jackson has little to work with script wise and does his best to look menacing throughout, but that’s about it.

The same is true of Rachel Bilson who again struggles to find anything worthwhile and meaningful to say or do and ends up as little more than eye candy. The star of the show for me was Jamie Bell who as Griffin the other Jumper gets the lion’s share of the best lines and dialogue, so much so that the screen is an empty place when he’s not on it.

The film ends raising more questions than it answers and many people will argue that the film has massive plot holes and is incomplete, however I suspect that that is entirely what it was designed for and speculate that Jumper 2 will be in cinemas before long to finish off the story, hopefully ending a lot more satisfactorily than the first.

OK, so this movie was never going to be a serious contender for a truck load of Oscars or some visionary piece of epop making cinema that will influence generations to come……it simply is what it is peaking at just above average. Like so many recent Sci-Fi/Action adventures, Jumper has all the hall marks of a middle of the road movie that would surely entertained and killed a couple of hours, but never really packs to much of a punch to leave a lasting impression.