I Watched This On Purpose: Jumper

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.

Cultural infamy: Critics didn't like Jumper, and it doesn't appear to
be the kind of movie that anybody's going to be thinking about six months from
now. (Or even right now, come to think of it.) It did respectable box-office,
but it was released earlier this February, when competition from other popcorn
flicks was virtually nonexistent. It seemed designed in every way to make a
little cash and then be quickly forgotten. Worldwide, it has brought in $221
million, which is more than I will ever bring in, but that still isn't enough
to let it crush its way into the cultural zeitgeist. (Still, Jumper 2 is already in the works,
so somebody must've liked it.) It got a 35 on Metacritic, with the highest
rating being a 67 from the Portland Oregonian, which qualified a
semi-positive review by calling the movie "sexless and humorless." Our own
Tasha Robinson, who doesn't like half-stupid movies nearly as much as I do,
gave it a C-, but her review made me want to see it all the more. Rotten
Tomatoes—a very stinky 16 percent.

Curiosity factor: I'm gonna share something
with you about myself. I am 34 years old, recently married, and with what most
people would consider a solid job. In other words, I am a grown-ass man. But
somewhere in my psyche lives a 12-year-old who can't help but get a little
excited by the idea of a dude teleporting around the world and stealing shit.
That's essentially all I knew about Jumper going in, but its main conceit was enough
to get me excited. I knew Hayden Christensen was going to suck donkey ass,
because he's just a terrible actor. I knew that somehow the filmmakers would screw
things up by trying to have a love interest, and by trying to make the
protagonist learn something about keeping his powers in check. But that
premise—dude can teleport, and then other dudes try and stop him or something—had
me ready to pop the DVD in no matter what. Also, I can't help but think about
the 1980 movie The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything, in which Robert Hays
inherits a watch that can stop time. When I was a kid, I wanted the fuck out of
that watch.

The viewing experience: Before I even pressed
play, anticipating watching Jumper infected my brain with the chorus of Third Eye
Blind's horrible anti-suicide song "Jumper." ("I wish you would step back from
that ledge, my friend.") That song, in turn, always makes me think of the even
more horrible "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" by Billy Joel, which features
one of 1985's most annoying God-complex videos—a guy is having a bad day,
so Billy Joel sings him a jaunty song, and he doesn't want to jump off a bridge
anymore. And to think, people whose opinions I respect have some admiration for
Billy Joel.

Anyway, on to the jumping that doesn't kill
you—the teleporting kind! The DVD menu for Jumper doesn't say "play," it
says "Initiate Jumper," which is another sign that this movie is probably aimed at
teens. I did not hesitate to initiate Jumper. I almost immediately
heard the disembodied voice of Hayden Christensen telling me his
backstory—where he's been that morning, etc. He sounds remarkably like
that increasingly arrogant Anakin Skywalker fellow. "Once I was a normal
person, a chump just like you," he sneers, managing to overact even while not
onscreen.

And then we don't even get to see Hayden for 15
minutes. It's history time first, with some high-school experiences that shape
our young hero: He's in love with little Millie, and he gives her a snowglobe
because he knows how much she wants to travel the world. A mean ol' bully

throws the globe onto a barely frozen river, and when young Hayden makes the
dangerous trek to fetch it, he falls through the ice and almost drowns. The
only thing that saves him? You guessed it, he teleports his way out, ending up
in the library.

How do you, the viewer, know what just happened,
besides the fact that you're at a movie about a teleporting kid? How about this
line of amazing dialogue: "Did I just teleport? I teleported to the library!"
So now you know that he a) teleported and b) teleported to the library. Another
clue that he teleported to the library: He just appeared in a big room filled
with books. Our hero—his name's Davy Rice, but the bully calls him Rice
Bowl—decides to leave small-town Michigan with his newfound powers. But
first he must learn how to use and control them, which he does in a park. How
do you, the viewer, know that he's learning to use and control his powers?
Here's some Neil Simon-level shit: "How does this thing work? How do I control
it?"

Of course, he learns to control it and use it, and
the first thing he does is start robbing banks. This is the part of Jumper I was slightly excited
about: What would you do if you could just pop in and out of any part of the
world? Probably some cool shit, right? Apparently not. You'd gather a bunch of
money, and then eventually grow up to be Hayden Christensen. And continue to
rob banks, even though you already have a killer pad and a ton of cash hidden
in the walls. But you shouldn't rob too many banks, because Jesus Christ,
somebody's gonna figure something out at some point. (But not soon
enough—Jumper drags when it should be jumping.)

Instead of showing us all the magnificent things
Davy can do with his power, we see him wandering around his house, taking a
shortcut to the remote control, etc. It stops just shy of him teleporting to
the toilet to take a shit, but you can fill in that blank yourself.

Aside: How, how, how did the music supervisor on Jumper miss the opportunity to
use House Of Pain's "Jump Around" in the entire movie? S/he could've used that
song in every scene.

Eventually we meet Samuel L. Jackson, who is once
again playing his bad-ass self, only this time he's got white hair and a mean
streak. (Sam Jackson cheat-sheet: If he has a 'fro and a gun, you're watching Pulp
Fiction.
If he's limping, you're watching Unbreakable. If he's sweating and
bluesy, you're watching Black Snake Moan. If he's wearing a brown robe, you're
watching Episode III.) He catches another jumper (you mean there are more?) and
stabs him in the chest, teaching the audience that jumpers can be temporarily
stopped with electric shocks. As you can guess, this will be important later,
so Jackson says, "It's kinda hard to jump with a thousand volts running through
your brain." And then, in case it isn't clear that he has harsh feelings toward
those who can teleport, he says, "I hate jumpers." We also come to understand
that Jackson has religious motivations for this hatred: "Only God should have
the power to be all places at all times." Heavy. Of course, Jackson and Anakin
must meet and have a little fight.

Oh, I forgot to mention that for some reason,
jumpers also seem to have superhuman strength and kick-ass fighting abilities,
even the ones that have basically just been fucking around and getting rich for
10 years.

For some reason, maybe because now his life is in
danger, or maybe because there's not enough plot here to sustain anything
nearing feature-length, Hayden/Davy/Anakin heads back to Michigan to pursue his
true love, snowglobe girl. She's tending bar at some shitty place, and he
sweeps her off her feet by taking her to Rome, where she's always wanted to go.
They end up at the Coliseum, where for some strange reason, Italian authorities
saw fit to allow Jumper to film a fight scene.

Here, though, we learn some key shit: There's
another jumper following Davy, and he's played by Brit Jamie Bell, a.k.a. Billy
Elliot. For some reason, Davy doesn't tell Millie about his superpower, which
seems a little out of character. When he starts blasting through walls, she realizes
this is all a little too good to be true. They end up arrested, and Diane
Lane—Davy's mom, who abandoned him at age 5—appears and tells him
to run away. He doesn't seem that surprised to see her, but I'm kinda sure that
Hayden Christensen was absent during the acting class in which they covered
surprise. (He was like the Ferris Bueller of acting school.)

At this point, you may be longing for some
explanation. Who are these jumper-hunters? Why do they give a shit if some
teleporters are having some fun and robbing banks? ("Your money is insured by
the federal government. We want to hurt no one." —Robert De Niro, Heat.) Get this—it turns
out that they want to kill them because they don't like them! Billy Elliot
explains:

A light goes on in Hayden's head, and he realizes
that baddy Sam Jackson will probably go after his family. When he gets back
home, he finds his pop (Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer's Michael Rooker) dead.
His ladyfriend is still on a plane, so he decides he's gotta kill Sam Jackson
before Sam can kill his lady. Makes sense, right? Hayden is the one with the
superpower! Pop in, shoot him, pop out. Element of surprise, my friend—he
has it all!

But he doesn't use it, because he is a stupid,
stupid superhero. Hayden goes to explain everything to the girlfriend, and when
Sam Jackson telegraphs his entrance by generally making a ruckus, Anakin
doesn't jump away with his princess, he gets all nervous and tries to interject
some comic relief when it's needed least.

So Davy just waits until the baddies get there, at
which point we learn that the non-jumpers have some sort of machine that they
can use to follow the jumpers through wormholes! (They haven't even been called
wormholes until this point.) This of course makes no sense, but it does make a
better movie, because Jackson and his Paladins (did I mention the baddies were
called Paladins? Did the movie even mention it before now?) can now follow them
to the Egyptian pyramids for big fights. Eventually, in pretty much the only
really clever use of jumping in the movie, Jamie Bell jumps a bus from a busy
city street into the desert, nearly crushing Jackson. (But not actually
crushing him, because a) this is a PG-13 movie and b) there's already a sequel
in the works.)

At some point in here, there's a half-hearted
excuse for Anakin and Billy Elliot to fight each other, and they end up on top
of a pyramid. Because why not, really.

In a strange little coda, Billy tracks down Diane
Lane, who hopefully got paid a ton of money for the five seconds she's in this
movie. Turns out she's a Paladin, and she abandoned him as a child when she
realized he was a jumper—because she didn't want to have to kill him.
Awwwwwww. What are the chances, right? It's like a Hatfield giving birth to a
McCoy or something. Or a snake having a rat baby.

And then it ends, with a big ominous scene that
specifically promises a sequel. The source material—a novel by Steven
Gould—was thrown out of the window for this movie, and director Doug
Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity) has hinted that in future installments, jumpers might not
just be able to travel through space, but through time as well. Speaking of time…

How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time? Not
much, I'm sorry to report. It wasn't painful, and though it dragged at points,
there was zapping and jumping enough to keep it very, very mildly interesting.
I'm gonna say 10 minutes (about 11 percent), which is hardly a recommendation,
but also probably enough to get me to watch Jumper 2 on purpose. But
seriously, guys, find Eminem—who was reportedly considered for the
lead—and re-cast this thing.