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Jumper is about a slim high school boy David (Max Thierot as the young David) who discovers he has a unique gift—jumping—during a life-threatening situation. While he is braving the frozen lake to fetch a glass ball for his big crush Millie (Rachel Bilson), the ice gives way and the icy cold lake swallows him alive. David is given up for dead, but what really happens is, his unique gift manifests for the first time, enabling him to “jump” out of the icy lake and into some place dry and warm—he mysteriously lands inside a library in the city. He does not understand how it happens, but he experiments with his newly found gift, “teleporting”, which makes him effortlessly leap from one location to another, until it leads him to rob a bank without opening doors. Becoming an instant millionaire while eluding the police, he escapes his abusive father and moves to New York —assuring himself nobody knows he’s still alive anyway, and that he can pay back the bank “later.” Eight years later David (now played by Hayden Christensen) is pursuing a lifestyle of anonymity and opulence in the Big Apple, and looks for Millie again. He finds her working in a bar, and invites her on a dream trip to Rome. In Rome he discovers he is not the only jumper in the world, and in fact, Roland (Samuel Jackson) is in hot pursuit of him. Roland is a “paladin”, one of those whose mission is to kill jumpers.
Obviously science fiction, Jumper may be enjoyed as long as you suspend your analytical faculties and just “jump along” with the teleporting protagonist as he vanishes from a one-night stand in London to lunch atop the head of the Sphinx facing the Gaza pyramids, and to pop into the surfing scene in Fiji before he calls it a day. The trailer promises to deliver a nifty movie but somehow the movie itself looks like almost nothing more than one long trailer. What with the can’t-help-but-be-shallow dialogue, the fight scenes that look more like skirmishes, and the thinly-drawn characters who are more credible before the teleportation begins! Considering how movies these days depend so much on CGI to outdo one another in the realm of the fantastic, Jumper will have a difficult time jumping out of mediocrity from among a horde of other science fantasies. Certainly viewers would expect more from Jumper’s director Doug Liman who also did The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
If you love your children, tell them Jumper is synonymous with “unscrupulous”. Tell them that regardless of what some of their elders are doing, life is more than globetrotting on ill-gotten wealth. Ask them what they would do if they had the same gift of teleportation. Would they do as Jumper David did—zapping into bank vaults and on that ill-gotten wealth live like a king, “skipping the boring details” at airports and seeing the world without benefit of a passport? That’s the sad part—with such a unique gift, the hero cannot think beyond his caprices, plus, he endangers his girl’s life in an effort to please her, without an iota of guilt! There’s an attempt by the paladin Roland to teach him a lesson—“You can’t be like God who can be anywhere you want to be without consequences!”—but oh, it almost sounds like the director’s afterthought, and anyway, the black man Roland’s white hairdo is as distracting as loose dentures; no wonder he doesn’t seem to succeed in making David repent.
(Date Reviewed: 14 February 2008)
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