Review: JUMPER

The movie Jumper provides some pretty decent entertainment.
I will deal with the latter first, and the former last; the mindless sex was just that, and done entirely off camera.

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Wikipedia describes the film as ‘a 2008 science fiction film based on the 1992 science fiction novel Jumper by Steven Gould.’ Directed by Doug LIman – the man behind the Bourne series of movies – and starring Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson and Rachel Bilson, I was passable happy with the movie.

Without entirely ruining the plot of a movie that is still screening – at least here in Australia – the movie centers on the life of a teleporting young man. The opening twist is that, instead of the stereotypical apparent need of humanity to do good whenever superpowers are given to them, Christensen’s character David Rice decided to start robbing banks.

It’s what I would do!

One thing leads to another and we end up with Samuel L. Jackson’s character – a member of a group calling themselves Paladins, sworn to killing all the ‘Jumper’s – tracking down David Rice.

Rachel Bilson does a great job of ‘damsel in distress’ and pulls it off with her ever present style and beauty. However Samuel L. Jackson’s hair had me in mind of a weird type of ice-cream; black men shouldn’t have platinum blonde hair.

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Christensen’s acting was, as always, passable. The young man copped a lot of flak for his role in the Star Wars prequels, even though his performance was a mixture of ineptitude and bad directing. In this movie, Christensen plays the character we expect him to be. Nothing fancy, not an out of this world performance that we might expect say from actors like Ewan Mcgregor; but nor were we asking him of that.

The special effects, if nothing else, were mind-blowing. If you like you’re SFX, then you will see this movie for those alone. There is nothing quite like watching a double-decker bus “bamf” out of nowhere and nearly kill Samuel L. Jackson.

I use the term ‘bamf’ to describe the effect, as it was essentially the same effect that was used in the X-Men 2 movie for Nightcrawler. That being said, it was done effectively for this movie, and only my neurotic desire to link everything to everything else picked up the link while I was sitting there marveling at the awesomitude of it all.

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All in all, this movie would rate 7 out of 10 for me, but given my rating system at Earth’s Mightiest, I’ll give it 3 out of 5. A good movie to go watch if you’ve got cheap tickets or nothing better to do, but don’t let it beat out movies like Juno or Atonement.

3 Mortal Fists

0 Yes
0 No
JHill
2/17/2008
Earth's Mightiest