Jumper (Doug Liman, 2008)

Jumper is a monumentally stupid movie about a guy with god-like powers who uses them to look cool standing in front of tourist attractions. It's going for the "superheroes without capes" thing that people seem to be into right now, and it succeeds admirably at achieving that misguided objective.

I feel bad for Hayden Christensen, I really do. In role after role, you can see him struggle valiantly under the weight of "words" and "movement". He's trying so hard, acting the hell out of every syllable, but he's never been able to transcend the whiny male model caste into which he was born. Sorry, dude. You are probably a fine human being, but you are a terrible actor. Christensen plays David, whose ability to teleport at will is discovered by the EVIL (he's so EVIL!) Roland Cox (Samuel L. Jackson). Roland is a "Paladin", part of a religious order that kills "Jumpers" because they regard their power as an abomination. So David goes on the run, taking his high school crush Millie (Rachel Bilson) along for the ride... because... umm...

They have sex, presumably only because they are pretty and in Rome and The Fray is playing on the soundtrack, and soon she's mixed up in his crazy teleporters-vs.-people-who-don't-like-teleporters-war. Some things happen, and then the movie is over.

Someone who seems to revel in the inanity of this whole enterprise is Samuel L. Jackson, who is hellbent on joining Christopher Walken as a walking monument to ridiculousness. But he's a lot more fun when he's not winking at the camera, and in Jumper he's too busy being crazy to wink. With white hair and a menacing growl, Jackson brings ten times the inherent watchability that Christensen commands to the screen. And there is this moment, this amazing moment, when he realizes that he's (spoiler, I guess) gotten his comeuppance, and the look on his face is one of the most incredible things I've seen on film for a while. Oh man, is it good.

Between this and 1408, the man's nearly succeeded at cornering the market on completely insane performances in sub-par genre movies. Hell, even his prestige performances (Pulp Fiction, Black Snake Moan) build their respectability on a foundation of trashy crap. Huh. Weird. That probably means something about something.

The director is Doug Liman, who made Swingers, The Bourne Identity (good, but easily the worst of the three), and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (blargh). While I always tried to tell myself that Swingers was about the unsatisfying hollowness of its main characters' affected neo-retro style, it's getting harder and harder to reconcile that line of thinking with his growing catalog. I still like Swingers (bunches), but I think it might have just been intended to look cool. Looking cool seems to be Doug Liman's chief auteurial concern.

There's a directness to Jumper that I liked a lot. Not having been based on an iconic pre-existing property, the film quickly establishes the power, the villain, and the conflict, and we're off. It doesn't get bogged down in superfluous fanboy shout-outs ("They're fighting a Sentinel in the Danger Room!") or ineffective gravitas. That said, Jumper buys into the trendy notion that robbing superheroes of their inherent absurdity, that grounding them in "the real world", is necessary to make them palatable to a 21st century audience. As with Heroes, "As long as they're not wearing masks or capes or underwear on the outside of their pants, the audience will eat whatever shit we feed them," seems to be the rule. But let's be honest, is this movie any less idiotic because it's not called Jumper-Man? The filmmakers seem to think that it is, but I disagree.