If you haven’t yet seen Jumper, then congratulations. You’ve dodged one of the single worst bullets I’ve ever had spat at me from my DVD player.
There’s a whole lot of separate factors adding together to get me to this, but before I lay into this wreck properly, first, the plot. Basically, a fifteen year old kid discovers he has the power to teleport to any place that he’s physically seen. Eventually, he discovers that he’s not alone in this particular ability, and that there’s a whole bunch of others out there who have taken the name of Jumpers. They’re pursued and killed by a supragovernmental organization called the Paladins, and their struggle goes back centuries.
You can just about figure out what a fifteen year old kid does with the ability to teleport at will–and for those of you who suggested girls’ bedrooms or locker rooms, try your second guess. Yes, of COURSE he hits a bank vault. And what begins here, and lasts for nearly forty minutes thereafter, is little more than a series of fanboy wish-fulfillment sequences. The Jumper will become wealthy, take whatever he likes, hit on hot chicks with impunity and hook up with an old high school sweetheart AFTER beating holy hell out of the former school bully. It’s a wonder they didn’t just elect him King of the World and have done with it.
Oh, right, because if they HAD done that, then they couldn’t introduce the handful of fight scenes by which the Jumper discovers he has a level of power previously thought FATAL. If the main character in this wreckage was a bigger Mary Sue he’d need to start wearing a SKIRT.
I’ll grant you that Jumper LOOKS great. Jumper SOUNDS great. All the bells and whistles are here and in full attendance. The brass is polished and the band is out on the…deck…playing “Nearer My God to Thee”. You should recognize what I describes as the same thing that happened in the last few hours of the Titanic’s seagoing life, and they’re an excellent parallel for Jumper. Jumper is the Titanic of movies, and not the movie Titanic. No, Jumper is a movie that some Hollywood hotshot thought everyone and his mother would love, but never actually bothered to make sure it would be good first, or that all the plotholes would be taken care of. Instead, what we get is forty minutes of fanboy wish-fulfillment followed by about another forty minutes of cheesy plot elements and even worse plot holes. I really didn’t want to know about this guy’s mother. I thought it was especially lowbrow to find out the Jumper’s mother was a Paladin. I saw her for a grand total of thirty seconds, so I really didn’t care a whit about her. She felt tacked on, like someone needed to pad a script and that was the best they could do. It was just…sad, really.
The whole thing was just sad, really.
All things considered, I can’t recommend this movie in anything resembling a good conscience. Why it exists, I can’t even venture a guess. But I can tell you to stay away from it–I only hope you’ll take the advice.
Popularity: unranked [?]
