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If the first thing you noticed about Jumper was the tagline —— ‘Anywhere, Anything, Instantly’ —— you could mistake it for the promotional jingle for an energy drink, or even some high-utility credit card. Post the movie, you have every right to consider Jumper a prolonged, hyperbolic advertisement for both the aforementioned. Yes, Jumper is more about high-voltage jumping (e.g. from London to Egypt in a jiffy) and instant money. And little more.
David Rice (Hayden Christensen) discovers at 15, that he can teleport to any corner of the world. So he ‘jumps’ from the head of a sphinx to a London bar, from a bedroom to a surfboard in Fiji, and in between he robs a bank, sleeps with women and sips cola in narrow bed for eight years. Enter Samuel Jackson (with a crop of white hair that suddenly makes Amrish Puri’s outlandish hairstyles in several obscure flicks seem a lot more palatable), the Paladin, or the brain behind an organisation committed to killing Jumpers. Thus begins the cat-and-mouse-chase.
The film, based on a series of teen sci-fi novels by Stephen Gould, ends up looking like a half-baked comic strip played out in reels. In fact, the graphics in any sci-fi comic strip have more adrenaline than the CGI effects of the movie. The script adapted from Gould’s work by David S. Goyer (Batman Begins), Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), and Jim Uhls (Fight Club) shows imagination only in sending the hero across tolerably picturesque locales.
To make matters worse, Christensen has none of the raw vulnerability typical of an underdog discovering his latent powers, made memorable by Toby Maguire in the Spiderman movies, nor the sharp sexuality of Keanu Reeves that makes most of Matrix. Result: He looks almost the same in all the frames, and one can but imagine him as the blue-eyed second lead of some pop band middle-school girls could swoon over.
Then, the loose ends. Very inspiring for closet bank robbers though. You strip a bank of all that is in its vault, crisply arranged and presumably numbered notes that is. And it takes eight years, that too for a group with special powers to detect phenomenon like Jumpers, to trace the robber. Whoever thought of alerting banks about serial numbers of stolen currency was adequately silly it seems.