Nowhere to ‘Jump’

When a movie is “high concept,” it tends to work around said concept and build a cohesive plotline, characters with depth and contain enough dramatic action to sustain an audience for two or more hours.
To say that “Jumper” had none of these elements would be just the beginning.

The film starts off with the monotone, passionless drone of Hayden Christensen’s voice-over, which tells us nothing that we are not already seeing or should not see in the scene itself. We see Christensen’s character, David Rice, at a young age, whereupon he discovers he can teleport. He likes a girl in school but she doesn’t know about his abilities. He teleports out and doesn’t come back until she’s a hot young woman so he can express his love for her; you know, all of those well-worn clichés.

We then, for some reason, need Christensen to explain to us in a voice-over that he did what anyone would do if they could teleport, which is of course, rob a bank and proceed to travel the world. He eats lunch on the Sphinx in Egypt, surfs in Fiji and performs other asinine cliches. All of these scenes seem to exist for the sole purpose of being “cool.”

Enter Samuel L. Jackson. He is the bad guy who kills jumpers because he is a part of a religious fanatic group who has been against them for thousands of years because they play god. For some reason, Jackson has no presence on the screen whatsoever. The ridiculous white hair he sports is ill-fitting to the movie and his character – and it’s ultimately distracting. As Jackson proceeds to chase Christensen around for the rest of the movie, Christensen meets Griffin (played by Jamie Bell). Bell had the potential to provide some relief from the poor cue-card ability of Christensen, but because of the poor writing in general and dead air that Christensen creates with every actor, he falls flat as well.

With lines like “You’re a jumper David, not a hero,” it’s a wonder any actor would be able to perform with a straight face.

So that’s about as much as you’re going to get for a plot in this film. It’s dead predictable what role the girlfriend would play in this film (a forgettable performance by Rachel Bilson) and the way it is left open-ended (please, for everyone’s sake, don’t make a sequel). It is almost like a mix between M Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” and “Butterfly Effect,” starring Ashton Kutcher. “Unbreakable,” in the sense that it has Samuel L. Jackson as the bad guy and is a pseudo comic book take and “Butterfly Effect,” in the sense that he jumps space instead of time- but actually Ashton Kutcher  outperforms Christensen (amazingly, it seems there is someone he can act better than). It’s got the disease of the “Butterfly Effect” with its pseudo- special effects that don’t do anything for the film and certainly don’t blow your mind.

It makes you want to believe it is a neat concept and it could have been a good movie, but a concept is never enough to make a good film.

This low-concept contains hack writing, hack acting, scenes for the sake of scenery, poor special effects, poor costume design, annoying hand-held camera work for no reason and, oh yeah, it’s only 90 minutes long but feels like it lasts two and a half hours.

Other than that, it was an unwatchable movie.