JUMPER (2008) - **

What if you could transport to any place on Earth within a second? What if you could go at any time with great ease? What if JUMPER actually had a plot beyond that?

Six years ago, Director Doug Liman shot the most influential Hollywood action movie of this decade in the blockbuster hit THE BOURNE IDENTITY, and that genre has been his bread & butter since then. But after the unsatisfying MR. & MRS. SMITH and now the pretty mediocre JUMPER, I wonder if Liman is just simply bored now with the normal-who-really-are-extraordinary-on-the-run plot template, or perhaps BOURNE was a fluke.

JUMPER opens up with a prologue that's painfully Emo. You know, the hero is a scrawny guts-less punk that gets pushed around; the parents are mean, blah blah. Jesus, I'm shocked he wasn't carrying around a razor blade. While drowning in a frozen lake, he accidentally "jumps" to the library. When he comes back years later to the town, nobody there is fazed that someone presumed dead is alive and kicking. Huh?

Don't worry; the nonsense in JUMPER is just getting started.

Try another scene when he takes his drunk Dad to the hospital, and the medical staff gets onto a gurney.....and making NO reaction at all to the crater that he created in the lobby. I guess Michigan hospitals have regular Jumper business or something. Still, I did sorta like how the immature young boy's first reaction to discovering his little trick, is to rob a bank. "Wouldn't you?"

Yeah I would.

We cut to him years later, as Hayden Christensen is super-duper-wealthy with a New York City penthouse, and he whines about how he never told his best friend. I thinking, "Well jackass, why didn't you?" I mean, if this guy held such low self-esteem in high school, wouldn't he have stroked his ego by showing off his secret power to a would-be girlfriend? Sorry dude, but its your fault that you abandoned her. Don't blame it off on insecurity or whatever CW Network crap. At worst, she freaks out and dumps you...which would arguably make her the jerk of this situation. Man Up!

So already, I don't give two shits about this guy, nor his situation, and It doesn't help that this is Christensen here. I tried to somewhat defend the guy years ago after the nerds crucified him with the STAR WARS prequels, of how maybe his performance, like the rest of the cast, was screwed by George Lucas' writing. But no, they were right. The guy lacks any charisma power to compel us, to capture our short attention spans and make us care. Compare him with Matt Damon in THE BOURNE IDENTITY. He captivated us not just because he could open up a can of whoop ass, but as well carry the sympathetic eyes of someone who doesn't know what he is, and thus rather damn afraid.

I guess Liman's great idea with the Hayden casting was that the guy has an arrogant face, and considering his carefree playboy jumper lifestyle....alright, I can understand that. But damn, we the audience is supposed to want to fantasize about being him, even if he's a dick, and not dreaming up ways to beat his ass. Look at Dennis Quaid in the 1980s B-classic DREAMSCAPE, where he uses his psychic powers to score on and off the racetracks. You may not agree with how he uses his power, but at least you enjoy him doing it.

JUMPER is one of those movies where the filmmakers concentrated their time, money, and energy solely on the visual effects, but probably spent more on the set lunches than they did on the script. Why did that girlfriend keep hanging around with Hayden despite all the fishy incidents around them? Girls, wouldn't you have slapped Hayden silly on the spot to know what the hell is going on? How did Hayden know how to transport a whole building if he didn't learn why a previous attempt fail? Why did the rival Jumper stalk the hero in the first place? How come we couldn't have gotten a real relationship, good or bad, between someone on the run for his whole life, and one that just started?

Better yet, how does this "Jump" gift even work? JUMPER can't decide whatever its by looking at a picture of a location, or from memories, or your emotions...make up your own damn mind movie!

Then there is the villain Samuel L. Jackson, who's part of some secret brotherhood of religious extremists out to exterminate all these Jumpers. Why? "Because only God should have this power." But what if God was the one who gave Anakin Skywalker this ability in the first place? Why you telling the Big Man up there how to do his job? Let the Vatican do that. Also, how do these guys even track Jumpers in the first place?

By the ending when Hayden confronts his mother, you don't give a damn at all why Diane Lane abandoned him as a child, and you're already trying to figure out why you rented this instead of MAGNUM FORCE. JUMPER has some splendid VFX that is wasted on a story (more like a glorified premise) that never starts, with people who never gets us involved, nor they ever thrill us. God help us that they improve with the inevitable sequel, or else I'll become comatose from disinterest.

Liman once shot the indie classic SWINGERS, the solid GO, and of course THE BOURNE IDENTITY, so I have hope that JUMPER was simply a misstep, but I fear that at this rate the man is now threatening to become the new Michael Bay.

Mr. Liman, please don't make me jump off a bridge.