Jumper or: Some asshole can teleport.

Now I can't discern if it was the poor writing or the poor acting that made me dislike Hayden Christensen's character David Rice in Jumper, so I'll blame both. The dialogue is never witty, but there are several times where Christensen is delivering lines as though he was reading Voltaire. Delivery without substance is empty. In addition, I found nothing likable about him. I was not looking for the character to be a hero or virtuous. I was just looking for something to latch onto - charm, integrity, anything but assholery. Some might think I'm being too harsh because so far I'll I've listed is bad acting and failed attempts at wit. In addition to these he robs vast fortunes from banks leaving behind I.O.U.s which seems to be nothing more then a petty rationalization on his part because he does nothing with the money, but buy every indulgence possible to keep in his overly lavish penthouse. If he were at least a Robin Hood figure this stealing could be admired. He also "jumps" with a former high school bully who teased him years ago into a safe so that the bully is placed behind bars. What led up to this was the bully on seeing Rice again for the first time in years enthusiastically greets him and genuinely wants to buy him a beer and hear how he's doing (everyone had thought he was dead, and they treat his apparent resurrection as nothing at all). It is after this Rice jumps the bully into a safe that lands him in government custody.

I've ranted without mentioning Samuel L. Jackson or his role as Roland the Paladin. Jackson's performance is well enough, and my only complaints are more with the writing. His character has superficial motivation and Jackson did what he could with this part. This motivation problem was due to the wholly incoherent doctrine of the Paladins. Now I believe that religious people are capable of performing crazy actions just as much as the next atheist, however I doubt any person who just wasn't flat out crazy would actually buy into the Paladins philosophy of: We ought to kill the jumpers because only God should be allowed to be in all places at once. This dogma is asserted twice in the film without ever being elaborated. I found this strange because I take it for granted that many Christians believe in a transcendent God who isn't very anthropomorphic which this doctrine seems to suggest - also the Jumpers clearly can't be in all places at once, so what's the deal?. Maybe the Paladins are just a throw back to an older, worse (less developed) dogma though (or maybe this was meant as a subversive statement that religion IS just this incoherent). It's still hard to see how a global conspiracy could be formed around such loose dogma or how, as we're told, the Paladins had any practical effect on the world until now. This may be confusing to those who haven't seen the film, so let me elaborate: Paladins have been fighting Jumpers since the dark ages. However, as the film shows us the only effective weapons against Jumpers are handheld, futuristic electrical shooting devices as well as some strange machine that allows Paladins to use "Jump Scars" to follow Jumpers through their jumps. If these are the only effective tools against Jumpers, Paladins would not have been able to do much against Jumpers until now. And I mean NOW the 21st century. Hell, even NOW I doubt their weird electrical devices could have batteries that lasted for very long considering the amount of electrical charge they seem to generate - but now I'm just getting nit-picky.

There are other actors (Brilson, Bell) who do well at their roles, but their characters are minor and don't offset everything Jumper does wrong. I don't recommend it.