I saw Jumper yesterday with my brother.
I was rooting for Cloverfield but he wanted to see Jumper. Why? I have no idea.
If you go in with low expectations, this movie is definitely watchable. Just know what you’re getting before you go in. If you don’t know, the movie is about a guy named David who discovers he can “jump”, which is basically like teleporting. I though’t, before seeing the movie, that it was going to be like Nightcrawler from X-Men, who can just port locally. But David can port wherever he wants.
I’m not gonna write down the whole plot here, just the things that bugged me. Because I like doing that.
So.. here is what you get.
Plotholes.
I’m gonna go ahead and spoil the movie for ya here because it won’t really compromise the experience at all.
First of all.. I always feel sorry for directors of superhero movies, or any movie where the main character discovers his or her superpowers. Because how would you react if you had super strength or the ability to fly or teleport or whatever. It’s not easy. Some movies do it well, some don’t. This one was kinda… bland.
He discovers his power one day when he falls through thin ice on a lake after a bully throws a snowglobe he had given to his crush. So he’s under the ice and suddenly he “jumps” to the library. Nobody raises any questions as to how he got there, with all that water. I’m gonna give them the benefit of doubt and assume the students thought he just.. fell.. with a bucket of water. His initial reaction isn’t bad. He’s kind of freaked out. But after that it’s as if it’s nothing special, he goes home to his so-called abusive father. Who didn’t even seem like a bad father, although he is labeled as one several times. When David returns home his father asks where he has been, and mentions his supper has gone cold (how dare he worry where his son has been, and what right does he have to make supper for him!?) David just ignores him and walks up to his room and looks the door. His father follows him up and tells him to clean up the mess he left downstairs (he was still wet from “water incident”). David decides he can’t take it anymore and runs away by jumpage.
Here’s something I did like though. How they conveyed that David is not a superhero. In one scene he is in his fancy apartment and he’s watching a news broadcast about some people stuck in a flood. On the news they mention “only a miracle could save these people”. *hint hint* But David just smiles at the TV and ports to go hang out in England. Indeed our protagonist is a selfish bastard. Horay.
What I didn’t quite like was how it seemed like there was no one else in the world except the main characters. All the time while he was jumping he would often do it in public places, and only once during the whole movie did they make a thing out of someone noticing the jumping. Otherwise it would be something like “whoa, where did that guy come from? Oh well, I guess it was nothing”. It reminds me of playing Tenchu, where you would savagely kill a guard and run away, and the other guards (who would sometimes witness said slaying) would just shrug and act like “Oh, i guess it was just the wind” and keep patrolling on his old route.
I feel like i should mention David’s love interest but I’m not going to because it’s not very interesting.
So let’s move on to the antagonist. Or should I say antagonists. The bad guys are called paladins (made me giggle) and they hunt Jumpers. Because indeed there have been jumpers ever since the middle ages and they are “among us”. The paladin leader is played by a white haired Samuel L. Jackson. He is just humans but he seems to be able to take an unnatural amount of beating as well being able to survive incineration. I don’t know if it’s high fire resistance. Or just a paladin bubble (sorry, couldn’t help it). The explanation of why the paladins hunt jumpers isn’t really satisfying. They’re like fanatic religious and keep claiming that “Only God should have the ability to be everywhere at once”. They incapacitate the jumpers by shocking them with electric current which prevent them from jumping. They use something that looks like Daredevil’s baton, only these ones are also tazers.
Also the paladins are treated as if they are the only people in the world. They are indeed bad people because they kill innocent people alot. Why do they never go to jail? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Why is there never any suspicion raised as to why this David guy keeps popping up in the middle of the street? I don’t know.. I don’t know.
There’s also this whole thing with mother being a paladin and that she abandoned him when he was five blah blah blah. It doesn’t matter because that whole subplot is so poorly presented it shouldn’t have been in the movie in the first place.
David deals with Sam Jackson in the end. Not by killing him though. No, because David is different, he’s a good guy right? He says “I could have dropped you with the sharks”. But instead he just ports him to a remote cave in a canyon and ports back, leaving him behind. I honestly think Sam would have preferred the sharks, because the cave was probably as remote as they get and he is most likely going to starve to death.
At least we can rest assured he’ll be able to fend off any snakes that might show up.
PS: Sorry about the long rant, I don’t expect anyone to read all of, but if you don’t you’ll miss the subliminal message I left somewhere in the text
