Las Vegas Weekly

Anywhere is nowhere

You’ll want to beam yourself away from Jumper

What would you do if you suddenly found that you had the ability to teleport yourself virtually anywhere in the world, instantaneously? Would you use your power for good? For evil? Or—now here’s a riveting idea—would you use it for indolence? Zip into a few bank vaults to set yourself up in fine style, then spend your days eating lunch at various picturesque tourist attractions and teleporting yourself half a foot across the couch to grab the remote. That’s the sort of spine-tingling excitement that Jumper, a superhero flick without a superhero, has in store for you. If you enjoyed the X-Men trilogy, but secretly wished that it had spent more time observing Wolverine sitting at home alone spearing watermelon slices on his retractable claws, this is the inaction movie you’ve been breathlessly awaiting all your life.

I don’t mean to suggest that the film’s ostensible hero, David Rice (Hayden Christensen), has no enemies to battle. On the contrary, Jumpers, who have existed in secrecy for millennia, are constantly hunted by a group of xenophobic zealots known as Paladins, whose mission in life is to exterminate David’s kind. Why? Beats me. That information is apparently classified. The chief Paladin, Roland (Samuel L. Jackson, sporting a hilarious snow-white ’fro that makes him resemble an irate Christmas cookie), repeatedly intones that “only God should have such power,” and suggests that Jumpers are invariably corrupted by their absolute freedom of movement. Trouble is, though, we see no evidence to the contrary, since the only two Jumpers we ever meet—David and a smart-ass Brit named Griffin (Jamie Bell)—are singularly self-involved. David cares about protecting his childhood sweetheart (The O.C.’s Rachel Bilson), but in every other respect he comes across as shallow, narcissistic and loathsome, which means that there’s nobody to root for. It’s like watching K-Fed being stalked by Pat Robertson.

Also, if you think about it, there’s a good reason why we haven’t seen many films involving teleportation: Who cares? First the character is one location, then a split second later he’s in another location, perhaps halfway across the world. We see that in movies and on TV every day. It’s called a “cut.” Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and his effects team do their damnedest to dazzle us, warping the frame at the point of rupture and accompanying each jump with a vaguely metallic “whoosh!” noise, but the novelty, which is negligible to begin with, wears off in a big hurry. Staging otherwise routine fight/chase sequences before a constantly shifting background doesn’t magically make them thrilling to behold—a lame fistfight on the observation deck of the Empire State Building looks pretty much the same as a lame fistfight on the streets of Tokyo. And yet the film seems to regard these tiresome set pieces as its raison d’être, never even bothering to wonder how the ability to transcend time and space might change a person, for better or worse. (When David, who hasn’t yet revealed his power to his girlfriend, flies with her to Rome on a commercial jet, Jumper can’t be bothered to show us the impatience he’d surely experience, even in first class.)

Still, paucity of imagination aside—David S. Goyer (of Blade fame) wrote the painfully choppy script—Jumper’s most serious problem is its leading man, whose overpowering aura of whiny entitlement could make any film insufferable. Christensen was ideally cast as duplicitous reporter Stephen Glass (in 2003’s Shattered Glass), as it’s great fun to watch Peter Sarsgaard’s suspicious editor gradually reduce this snot-nosed twerp to sniveling pulp. Just don’t ask us to empathize with the guy. (See also: Anakin Skywalker.) And with such an emotional void at its center, the film has trouble distracting us from its numerous lapses in logic and plausibility. Would a bank guard really conduct a customer to a restroom located just down the hall from the vault? David eats lunch atop the Sphinx, just because he can—is he also invisible? (And is he having lunch at 3 a.m. New York time? Because that’s when it would be noon in Cairo.) We see him stroll through the lobby of his building, then teleport into his apartment as the elevator doors close ... but why bother with the lobby at all? Clearly, nobody thought any of this through. They just wanted to jump straight to opening weekend.

Jumper

*

Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, Rachel Bilson, Jamie Bell, Diane Lane

Directed by Doug Liman

Rated PG-13

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