“What’s my dishwasher doing in the library?”
It’s common knowledge that the superhero movie market is oversaturated. Even diehard fans of expansive cinematic universes that grow by five films and eight television seasons every year find themselves getting worn out. It becomes a chore to keep up, a never-ending marathon of box-checking to ensure you’re up on the latest and greatest… er, the latest, anyway. If the antidote to this overbearing trend is not a move away from CGI comic book action, we can at least hope for an increase in standalone superhero films that can be enjoyed for a few popcorn-chomping hours and then forgotten about.
There have been a few solitary bright spots over the years—Hancock, Watchmen, Dredd, Darkman, The Shadow, Unbreakable (later turned into a little Shyamalan cottage industry); more recently a lot of people other than me enjoyed Everything Everywhere All at Once1—but also some real stinkers. Jumper, directed by Doug Liman from a novel by Steven Gould, is a real stinker.
Heavily indebted to the recurring X-Men storyline that sees an organized force tracking down and killing mutants, Jumper posits a class of humans that can teleport to any location they can conjure up in their mind’s eye. Early on, after discovering his nascent ability, David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is escorted past an open bank vault. A few minutes later he’s been in and out without anyone the wiser. Does David use his newfound powers for the furtherance of good, to combat evil, to do anything at all of interest? Alas, no, he just loads up on stolen cash and chills in his luxurious apartment, pining after his high school crush Millie (Rachel Bilson) and occasionally taking afternoon vacations to foreign landmarks.
In lieu of anything resembling a story, Jumper immediately locks David into a loop of fending off and fleeing from a ruthless white-haired Paladin (Samuel L. Jackson) with a high-powered cattle prod, whose sole justification for dedicating his life to hunting down and killing Jumpers is that only God should be omnipresent (seems like Theology 101 is in order). Nothing’s really at stake, however. The Paladins don’t want to harness the Jumpers’ power, the only other Jumper we meet (Jamie Bell) isn’t using his powers for evil (just to kill Paladins, ironically)—it’s just a private religious conflict to be settled with the shedding of blood.
Liman’s usually only as good as his script, and the one provided by David Goyer, Jim Uhls, and Simon Kinberg, which apparently has little to do with the novel beyond its name and its superpower (I have not read the book), has little-to-no personality, which undercuts a production that needed all the help it could get to overcome Christensen’s charmless pretty boy performance. The busy action of Liman’s The Bourne Identity worked because the unfolding mystery generated considerable narrative intrigue, but seeing Christensen zip around the world and occasionally get electrocuted while claiming he’s different from the other Jumpers is simply too feeble to warrant serious investment. Which is a real shame, because while I was watching the film I thought of about six thousand better stories that the premise could have been used to tell. Like, what if a Paladin (Diane Lane) whose child happens to be a Jumper would brainwash said child into hunting down his own kind? Alas.
1. Let’s ignore that most of these films would have sequels if they had made enough money.