Jumper is a fairly interesting concept. The ability to jump is never given a scientific basis – people just seem to be born with it – and the people who hunt jumpers are never given much of a rationale beyond – “You’re an abomination. Only God should have the ability to be all places.” Beyond that the the characters are largely undeveloped and the movie is lacking a certain something I like to call a plot.
At the end of the movie my feeling was that the movie was pretty pointless. There’s no central theme or overall story arc. The story just seems to happen to the character. Oddly enough there’s a pretty prominent actor (Diane Lane) who plays a very minor (in terms of screen time) role. Either a lot of her performance was left on the cutting room floor or she was there for some other reason. That other reason would be sequels. The movie feels almost like a pilot for a TV show and the concept would seem to be good one for a TV show or perhaps a series of movies. Diane Lane’s character delivers one of those obvious “we’ll be making a sequel” lines near the end of the movie and I wouldn’t be surprised if the intention is to bring her back in a bigger role in a future version.
- Effects – pretty good – the locations of course are spectacular
- Action – decent enough
- Plot – virtually non-existant
- Performances – Sam L. Jackson oddly disappoints for some reason. Rachel Bilson is cute which seems to be her character’s main quality, Hayden Christensen does ok in the lead
- Overall: probably a 2 of 5 – worth watching when it hits TNT and you have nothing better to do
My rating: stars
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