Column:

‘Jumper’ falls flat

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 22, 2008

“Jumper” is in the unfortunate position of an adolescent male fantasy masquerading as a high school date movie. When that fundamental issue is combined with a schizophrenic script, a cramped conflict and the worst leading man alive, “Jumper”’s tagline, “anywhere is possible,” seems most useful as a reminder that you can leave the theater whenever you want.

Which is not to say “Jumper” was doomed from the start — that would be giving the people involved too much credit. The film’s best moments occur at the beginning, an archetypal superhero-origins story. David, a poor kid living a solitary life in depressed Michigan, makes an awkward attempt to court Millie, the classic girl-next-door.

When a bully throws his gift to her out onto the ice, he falls through trying to retrieve it. Presumed dead, he has accidentally discovered his ability to “jump” through space at will. He leaves his gift, a snow globe, at Millie’s doorstep and disappears to New York to escape from his old life.

It doesn’t hurt that the actors portraying the high school versions of our protagonists, Max Thieriot and AnnaSophia Robb, are less wooden and far more likeable than their sneering adult counterparts. But even with the execrable Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson there’s an interesting comic book Bildungsroman to tell. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get told. Screenwriter David S. Goyer switches gears completely upon flashing forward.

What was a story of a boy given a new lease on life becomes a story of how awesome he appears to 14-year-old boys. He drinks! He sleeps around! He’s fantastically rich and never works! He drives a Mercedes! Instead of seeing how David uses his power and how it’s changed him as a person, we’re introduced to Roland (Samuel L. Jackson with bleached hair), who wants to kill all the jumpers for some reason or another and is a part of some shady, unexplained organization created for that purpose. The eighth-grade instinct comes through again: Roland and his fight scenes seem to have been brought into the picture only when someone realized, halfway through, that nobody had written a bitchin’ fight scene yet.

With so much of the film devoted to exposition and backstory, this shoehorned conflict has no room at all. David picks up Millie early on, in a completely flaccid, catastrophic resolution to their relationship. Instead of growing as a character, he chases and is chased by Roland for the duration of the movie. When it ends — anticlimactically, of course — we’re given a “twist” so completely vestigial to the semblance of a storyline we’re left with, so utterly derivative of better movies, that it suddenly seems a viable theory that the film was not just made for adolescent boys, but by them. “Jumper” has many ideas about what belongs in a cool movie, but no idea of what makes one tick. In the end all its oversexed bombast is like preparing for a drag race by putting a giant spoiler on your Corolla.