Movie Review: Jumper

It has been a while since I had regretted a movie ticket purchase this much. In retrospect, I should have jumped theaters to see the Spiderwick Chronicles than suffer through the lame movie Jumper.

Jumper is a superhero movie with no heroes. It has superpowers and villains, but no discernible plot and no motive for the hero to use his powers other than for sex, wealth and to save his own life.

Hayden Christensen plays David Rice, a weird loser who uses his teleportation powers to amass wealth and fun toys like surfboards and motorcycles. Given the opportunity to use his powers for good, like saving people trapped in floodwaters, he instead goes surfing in the Maldives. He leaves IOU’s in the bank vaults he empties, but he never pays them back. Ultimately he uses his powers to impress his old high school love interest who is a crappy bartender at a college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by taking her to Rome. By plane.

There he meets another Jumper named Griffin, played by Jamie Bell, who tells him about the “Paladins” who for some unexplained reason, hunts down jumpers and wants them to die. And Hayden Christensen’s mom, played by Diane Lane, turns out to be a Paladin too, and abandoned him when he was five rather than killing him. Again, for no other explanation than that was the way “things always were.”

Hayden Christensen’s acting was more stilted than his Anakin character in Star Wars. The plot was non-existent to stupid, the direction was sloppy, the editing was too quick, and even the set designs were bad. I would like to give props to the special effects department, but I can’t. Even the act of teleporting was boring and uninteresting.

There was some pretty decent popcorn, but otherwise, this was a huge waste of 90 minutes.