Friday, February 6, 2009

Thursday Night at the Movies - Jumper

Jumper is based loosely on a 1992 Steven Gould Novel of the same name. I remembered reading the book and liking it so was looking forward to the movie, which was released almost a year ago. It got pretty bad reviews so we never went to see it. My daughter brought it home from the library (she'd also liked the book) since there wasn't anything in the theater we wanted to see.I guess the movie wasn't so bad although I glad we didn't pay to see it in the theater. The plot is simple, David Rice is a Jumper, he can teleport himself and apparently anything he's touching to anywhere in the world. For years he robs banks and pretty much has a good time. That is until the Paladins catch up with him. The Paladins are a secret group that have been hunting down Jumpers down through the ages. The chief Paladin is Samuel L Jackson, basically playing his righteous Pulp Fiction character but with white hair. The real problem with the movie is that none of it makes any sense. And they make very little attempt to make it make sense. My recommendation is that if you're trapped on the sofa and this movie comes up on cable and there isn't a baseball game on, go ahead and watch it. But don't go out of your way for it.

I looked the movie up on imdb.com because I couldn't remember when the movie was released. Imdb.com has a section on the page with links that people interested in the movie might be interested in. There was one link to a hospital specializing in "Psychiatric and Chemical Dependency Treatment for Adults and Teenagers" and two suicide prevention web sites. Just what are they trying to tell me about people who like this movie?

1 comment:

Motherscratcher said...

You pretty much nailed it when you said it didn't make any sense. It's too bad because the concept has a lot of potential.

The other main problem is Hayden Christiansen being a brutally bad actor who's not compelling or interesting in any way whatsoever.