Jumper « lategaming

18Feb/080

Jumper

From IMDB:

A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between "Jumpers" and those who have sworn to kill them.

I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though I think they could have kept Max Thieriot as the protagonist even though it might have made the film either more kiddie-friendly or perhaps more dark, who knows.

There were a lot of loose ends, lots of things that went unexplained - like how this is all a secret when there are 5 year olds teleporting around - Marvel went with the puberty thing because, let's face it, teens undergoing puberty are already alienated from society.

One tiresome detail though was the war that has been raging for centuries. Of course, now Jumpers are the REAL reason for the Crusades, the witch hunts, the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto, the reason for concentration camps, Stalin's purges, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Great Fire of London. I'm exaggerating here but if you ignore the "paladins" thing and just assume they're just the next logical extension of HomeLand Security, things go a lot better.

The real "deal killer" for me was sadly Samuel L. Jackson. He's gone the way of Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro and every other Hollywood actor who now completely believes his own hype. Apart from the ridiculous hair dye job, he's a crazy insane preacher who uses a signature hunting knife to viscerally gut people. And this is a 12A? Load of bollocks really. They should have made more use of Diane Lane rather than a few cameo pieces. I think she'd make an excellent head honcho and an even better foil for our hero.

That said, deal-killer or not, it's not a bad film. I think they have expended a lot of their juice in the first film and if it were me I'd already have Jumper 2 ready for casting.