Jumper

Review by Zachary K. Parker

Doug Liman’s “Jumper” does a lot of acrobatic tricks, both in action and in story, but neither one stands out. Based on the sci-fi novel by Steven Gould, “Jumper” has a great concept and, to its credit, the film was mostly interesting enough that I never found myself looking at my watch.

            By looking at pictures or thinking of specific places, David Rice (Hayden Christensen) easily teleports himself there with extreme force because as the tagline boasts, “Anywhere is possible.”

At first, his ability creates an opportunity for him to escape his oppressive home and community permanently, where the father (Michael Rooker) is abusive and alcoholic and the mother (

Diane Lane

) abandoned David when he was a child.

Then David makes an easy life for himself as an adult who acts like someone who thinks the world is a child’s jungle gym where he can avoid anything unpleasant and play with his god-like power. We do not learn much about David unless from a flashback, and in the present, Christensen’s stilted delivery hurts the character exposition even more.

With an ostensibly evil glare and powdery white hair, Samuel L. Jackson plays Roland, the leader of a religious group who has spent centuries tracking down and kill “jumpers.” He shows up in David’s apartment and proceeds to pontificate (as only villains do) while playfully chasing David around the room with a delightfully charming wand.

While David escapes this initial encounter, he disregards Roland’s threat and finds his middle-school sweetheart, Millie (Rachel Bilson), who now works in David’s hometown bar.

Even though David had supposedly died, both Millie and others do not seem at all surprised to see a dead man, greeting him instead as an old buddy. Thus, on the spur of the moment, Millie decides to go on a romantic rendezvous with a dead man in Rome.

In Rome, David’s vacation is interrupted by Roland’s minions in Rome’s coliseum where he meets another jumper, Griffin (Jamie Bell). Griffin has spent his life fighting Roland and his goons.

Jamie Bell is the film’s single most redeeming aspect. Bell continues to prove that he is one of the most talented young actors today. With “Undertow” and “Chumscrubber” to more playful acts like “Jumper,” he shows an impressive range, relying mostly on his easy charm and humor for “Jumper.”

David and Griffin spend the rest of the movie fighting Roland with a little “kidnapped girlfriend” trouble thrown in too. Ultimately, what could have been a nifty action film with the mysteries and consequences of teleporting ended up as a feeble cat-and-mouse chase. t lets Roland and his religious nuts shout intolerance towards the jumpers in the name of God. The film’s ending is below par, seeing as how it concludes none of its plotlines.

While Liman and the writers leave the film open for a sequel, I find myself torn. I would like to see more than what I saw here, but I dread having to sit through another stiff, patchy “Jumper.” Christensen spends most of his time looking down, as if ashamed because anywhere is possible, and anywhere is probably better than “Jumper.”