Jumper (spoilers)

[OGpistolpete]

*SPOLIERS* (Not in my post but probably later in the thread.)

I saw that Jumper movie. It really wasn't that bad, and I was expecting it to be horrible. But I enjoyed the characters, and Rachel Bilson is really really really really really really hot. The only thing I didn't like was that Samuel Jackson had white hair.

[Mling]

I liked the movie, i thought it was pretty good...

[Hellfire]

I read the book, which I liked, but I'm still wary about checking out the movie because I've heard so many conflicting reports about it. I've heard it was really good, good, alright, bad, terrible and awful. That's not good.

[stokeriño]

I'll put spoiler tags in the thread title since, well, it's inevitable.

I'll also copy and paste in what I said in the 'What Did You Watch Today' thread, as my rather negative two cents.

Spoiler: Click here to view

This is not a film. It is a feature-length pilot for a TV series.

You can talk about leaving a film open for sequels, but you should at least make the film stand alone in its own right. As it was, Jumper was entirely a 'setup' kind of film, and not a great one either.

1. Kid discovers he has the powers.

2. Kid pisses about with said powers.

3. Scuffles with bad guys (during which time the girl gets briefly kidnapped, natch), which are inconclusive.

4. Return to #2 for future repetition.

It doesn't help either, that Hayden Christiansen probably couldn't get any more unsympathetic if he put on a Vader helmet and comically yelled "NOOO". Throughout the entire movie the kid is selfish and, as fellow Jumper Jamie Bell points out with regularity, stupid. Put it this way: he calls 'normal people' "chumps" at the start of the movie, and fails to really progress from there. His redeeming features are supposedly his love for one Rachel Bilson (I say 'love', but other than being all teenage-crushy, expressing himself with little more than grunts, and getting her into all the trouble in the first place, there's not much going on there) and the fact that he decides not to kill the bad guys. Since when did that kind of thing become an acceptable standard of character development in films? If anything, the only development comes at the end when his girlfriend stops thinking he's weird and starts joining him in pissing about with his powers. Marvellous.

The setup for the world they live in and the good/bad guys dynamic mainly has to ascertained from Samuel L. Jackson talking about how Jumpers "should not exist" and "only God should have those powers" - essentially implying that they're religious nutjobs, as if the name 'Paladins' didn't do enough - but really the depth of it all is neatly summed up in a few short sentences from Bell: "Paladins kill Jumpers. I kill Paladins. End of lesson." After all, Samuel L. Jackson is a mean bastard, right? What more do you need to know?

Oh and the jumping special effects are all very nice, but nothing that would prompt a "whoa" in this day and age.

I read another review somewhere which said "it's one of those films that makes a very good trailer, but really suffers when you have to sit through more than an hour and a half of it", and I pretty much agree with that. It fails to bring anything special to the table in terms of graphics or plot, and a number of the actors (Christiansen in particular) serve to just drag it further into a pit of mediocrity.

Edited February 24, 2008 by stokeriño

[DMN in the House]

I thought it was fine for what it was, which was an hour and a half diversion, but, in hindsight, I wouldn't have payed $10.50 to see it. Probably the 'worst' movie I've seen this year, although I haven't really seen anything I thought was truly bad.

[Pepsi]

I thought it was bad. The actress made me want to slap her. I agree that this would have made a great pilot for a TV series but as a movie it just felt so...empty.

[punky]

Don't you dare diss Rachel Bilson, bitch.

[K]

So I finally watched this last night. It was pretty much the worst thing ever.

I felt no sympathy for any of the characters. I mean, even when we're supposed to be rooting for the Jumpers, they were fighting the Paladins by warping double decker buses and cars with civilians in, half way around the world and leaving them there. In the warzone the innocent dude in the car got killed by a tank and there was no remorse.

I really wanted Samuel L Jackson to win. Ok he wasn't a particularly nice guy, but from our perspective, he never really hurt anyone that didn't deserve it. We don't know what happened to that dude in the Jungle, and the two main Jumpers were absolute cunts.

Also.. he's Samuel L Jackson, and he looks like a pimp with white hair.

[Summers]

Bell was okay, Star Wars Ruiner was shit.