Jumper
Directed by Doug Liman
Doug Liman, director of Go, The Bourne Conspiracy and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is back, once again luring kids with movie candy. His latest piece of demographic bait is Jumper, a combination sci-fi romp and generation-gap allegory that proves Liman really puts thought into how to tap the box-office zeitgeist; it’s just that he’s always behind the curve.
David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is a lonely Ann Arbor kid who discovers he has special powers once puberty kicks in: He can teleport to any place on the globe just by thinking about it. At first this seems a nifty approach to the power of imagination. ìEscape to the library,î reads a poster in the school library, which is where David transports himself when he nearly drowns during an after-school fracas with Millie, his teenage crush, and a school bully.
But Liman bypasses the notion that kids escape through books (thus missing the poignancy that David might be a lonely dreamer). Instead, Liman’s commercial efforts go for creating the type of video game, action-movie escapism that makes David nothing more than a surrogate for Hollywood’s target audience.
Yet, even this notion is ruined through the cynicism of screenwriters David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg who lay on teen paranoia. David’s special gift (ìYou’re not a hero, you’re a Jumper!î) makes him the quarry of a group of Blade Runner–type assassins, Paladins, who throughout history have hunted down Jumpers for being a race of sacrilegious rebels. These Paladins represent the repressive forces of authority like David’s uncaring parents. Just as Liman waxed political in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, here he plays with more political division: Jumper/Paladin, Establishment/Youth, Left/Right—typical Hollywood hipster shtick.
None of these ideas go anywhere, crossed with Liman’s unshakable sense of middle-class privilege and instinct for big-budget exploitation. After planting ideas about David’s political apathy and selfishness (he jumps/robs banks to live on his own; he ignores Hurricane Katrina news on his plasma TV), Liman concentrates on delivering meaningless sci-fi fantasy sequences through state-of-the-art F/X. David can jump into new locations and rooms as if propelled through a splash of pond water or a cloud of bricks and plaster dust. This ought to make cool cartoon-panel images—real graphic-novel stuff—except that it’s excessive. It’s done in that jittery camera style that made people think the Bourne movies were exciting. Jumper’s F/X lack the degree of plausibility that comes either from great imagination or a circumstance that enhances credible life experience.
Determined to seduce the teen market, Liman loses his chance to critique youth-market insularity. He doesn’t satirize David’s sense of omnipotence—wallowing in unearned cash, the spoiled-kid license to jump anywhere in the world he wants (lunching atop the Sphinx, surfing the Pacific, trespassing Rome’s Coliseum). Instead, Liman mounts a globetrotting, Ugly American spree that, unlike the spry National Treasure: Book of Secrets, disrespects foreign totems. Due to constant scene-shifting, Jumper becomes an Attention Deficit Disorder adventure—a junior-year-abroad version of Juno.
Liman’s calculating enough to reunite those Star Wars alums Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson. This time they’re Jumper vs. Paladin adversaries but Christensen is pretty and inert as ever (an inward Steve McQueen) while Jackson does his usual evil Djinn thing. Their battle scenes are full of implausible juxtapositions: double-decker London buses in the Sahara desert, a dishwasher in the library stacks, etc. These images don’t rearrange your ideas of the social order. Liman’s movie candy is philistine, banal and lacks surrealist thrill. His sci-fi, quasi-political allegory is like an X-Men or Hulk narrative told from the ass end.
Directed by Doug Liman
Doug Liman, director of Go, The Bourne Conspiracy and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is back, once again luring kids with movie candy. His latest piece of demographic bait is Jumper, a combination sci-fi romp and generation-gap allegory that proves Liman really puts thought into how to tap the box-office zeitgeist; it’s just that he’s always behind the curve.
David Rice (Hayden Christensen) is a lonely Ann Arbor kid who discovers he has special powers once puberty kicks in: He can teleport to any place on the globe just by thinking about it. At first this seems a nifty approach to the power of imagination. ìEscape to the library,î reads a poster in the school library, which is where David transports himself when he nearly drowns during an after-school fracas with Millie, his teenage crush, and a school bully.
But Liman bypasses the notion that kids escape through books (thus missing the poignancy that David might be a lonely dreamer). Instead, Liman’s commercial efforts go for creating the type of video game, action-movie escapism that makes David nothing more than a surrogate for Hollywood’s target audience.
Yet, even this notion is ruined through the cynicism of screenwriters David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg who lay on teen paranoia. David’s special gift (ìYou’re not a hero, you’re a Jumper!î) makes him the quarry of a group of Blade Runner–type assassins, Paladins, who throughout history have hunted down Jumpers for being a race of sacrilegious rebels. These Paladins represent the repressive forces of authority like David’s uncaring parents. Just as Liman waxed political in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, here he plays with more political division: Jumper/Paladin, Establishment/Youth, Left/Right—typical Hollywood hipster shtick.
None of these ideas go anywhere, crossed with Liman’s unshakable sense of middle-class privilege and instinct for big-budget exploitation. After planting ideas about David’s political apathy and selfishness (he jumps/robs banks to live on his own; he ignores Hurricane Katrina news on his plasma TV), Liman concentrates on delivering meaningless sci-fi fantasy sequences through state-of-the-art F/X. David can jump into new locations and rooms as if propelled through a splash of pond water or a cloud of bricks and plaster dust. This ought to make cool cartoon-panel images—real graphic-novel stuff—except that it’s excessive. It’s done in that jittery camera style that made people think the Bourne movies were exciting. Jumper’s F/X lack the degree of plausibility that comes either from great imagination or a circumstance that enhances credible life experience.
Determined to seduce the teen market, Liman loses his chance to critique youth-market insularity. He doesn’t satirize David’s sense of omnipotence—wallowing in unearned cash, the spoiled-kid license to jump anywhere in the world he wants (lunching atop the Sphinx, surfing the Pacific, trespassing Rome’s Coliseum). Instead, Liman mounts a globetrotting, Ugly American spree that, unlike the spry National Treasure: Book of Secrets, disrespects foreign totems. Due to constant scene-shifting, Jumper becomes an Attention Deficit Disorder adventure—a junior-year-abroad version of Juno.
Liman’s calculating enough to reunite those Star Wars alums Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson. This time they’re Jumper vs. Paladin adversaries but Christensen is pretty and inert as ever (an inward Steve McQueen) while Jackson does his usual evil Djinn thing. Their battle scenes are full of implausible juxtapositions: double-decker London buses in the Sahara desert, a dishwasher in the library stacks, etc. These images don’t rearrange your ideas of the social order. Liman’s movie candy is philistine, banal and lacks surrealist thrill. His sci-fi, quasi-political allegory is like an X-Men or Hulk narrative told from the ass end.
