For twenty minutes or thereabouts, Jumper may be the greatest teen movie ever made. “Once I was just a chump like you,” explains Hayden Christensen’s brash young hero. Standing quite literally on the top of the world, he recounts his own personal superhero origins in a dazzling opening gambit. As a young beta male, driven by bullying jocks and a desire to impress a girl, he almost drowned under a frozen river. But just as he seemed to be breathing his last, he unexpectedly reappeared in his local library. Swoosh. Turns out he has the ability to transport himself anywhere. And like any right-minded 15-year-old he neither uses his powers for good nor evil, but for partying down.
Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity), a director who loves the whiff of testosterone and dumb male swagger more than most, is perfectly attuned to the potential for high jinx. While Mr. Christensen is living off the proceeds of a bank robbery, scoring chicks and ‘jumping’ between rainy London and sunny Egypt, all is well.
But pretty soon all is definitely not well. For all its bluster, Jumper has nowhere to go but the most heavily signposted places. The original novel by Steven Gould – itself a paler reworking of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination – has been chewed up, spat out and reordered in the most haphazard fashion. We should be in the middle of an epic, millennia old battle between the jumpers and the sworn enemies, the paladins. We barely get handbags at dawn. It’s almost as if Jumper doesn’t believe in the universe it seeks to create.
There is, off screen, a much grander conflict at work here; the ongoing struggle between Hollywood studios and smarter science fiction concepts. We await the remake of Stalker with the darkest fear.