Jumper

*WARNING* Contains mild spoilers. I’m not going to give away any ‘He was dead all along’ twists, but if you don’t want to know anything about this film, don’t read.

I’m easy to please when it comes to films. If a film delivers what I expect, even if I expect it to be generic, then I’m happy. If it delivers more, I’ll sing its praises. It isn’t often something is worse than I expect. Sadly, ‘Jumper’ is one of those films.

Mostly, I expected ‘Jumper’ to be cool. Everything about it told me it would be. It was about a guy who could teleport, who robbed banks and traveled the world. That’s cool. It was directed by Doug Liman who discovered Vince Vaughn and managed to make Matt Damon cool. The trailer looked awesome. And it had Samuel L. Jackson in it. Say what you like about him, Sam Jackson is the epitome of cool.

So how did the film end up so bland? Seriously, the plot goes nowhere; wandering from one sequence to the other without any real drive. Our hero is attacked right at the beginning but, after escaping, spends the next half hour of the film holidaying in Italy with his love interest. It wasn’t until right at the end that the film finally found some tension but, by then, it was way too late.

For the main character, I can’t really fault Hayden Christenson’s performance, but the character he played was lame. It started well, sure. He was cocky and self assured. Kinda cool. But this all fell apart with the entrance of Jamie Bell, and he just became such a weak character.

And what is up with the guy’s moral code? He’s willing to trap a school bully in a vault, but refuses to take any real action against the main villain; a guy who has killed hundreds of people including some close to the hero.

Speaking of the villains, I will never forgive this film for making Sam Jackson bland. He didn’t have any cool lines and only had the tiniest slip of motivation to be hunting Jumpers.

Then there seemed to be stuff left from the book that didn’t fit in the film. The mother storyline was a subplot that didn’t go anywhere (Ironically enough, I’d spent my day in a screenwriting lesson, discussing how all subplots should go somewhere or just be removed).

Also, little lines that didn’t fit. How did he know they were called Jump scars, without any prior knowledge? Why did he bring comics into the conversation, mentioning ‘Marvel Team-Up’? It felt like a scrap of dialogue left from the book, where the character was a lot younger and probably a comic reader. Just a guess.

On the plus side, I can add another bullet point to my ‘Why Anna Sophia Robb is going to be a BIG star when someone gives her a decent role’ list (I keep it next to my ‘Why more people should have heard of Nathan Fillion’ list). She did a lot with a small part and it was a bit depressing when they replaced her with Rachel Bilson, as good as Rachel was.

And the special effects were flawless, but I always feel I’m scraping the barrel when I have to bring them in to defend a film.

Don’t get me wrong. This may seem really negative, but the film isn’t bad. It just had so much potential to be amazing and it squandered it with unsympathetic characters, an absence of humour and sub-par fight scenes.

Hopefully the inevitable sequel will iron out some of these problems.

:D