(Corniest name for a post ever!  Woo!  What do I win?)

I watched Jumper the other day, and for a movie with a pretty interesting sci-fi concept, it turned out pretty awful.

And here’s the thing: it could have worked, really, but the script is just atrocious.  First of all, the back story goes on way too long for the very little it sets up.  And the bulk of the plot is paper-thin: there are people who can teleport, and there are people who hunt them.  That’s seriously it.  There’s no great dissection about how this battle between jumpers and their hunters came to be, or how certain people have the gift of teleportation, or who is pulling the strings behind the attempt to kill them all.

Nah, who wants story, when you can have your main character jump all over the world wherever he wants!  That’s cool!  Imagine who cool that would be!  Actually, don’t bother, because that’s the bulk of what the movie shows you - how awesome it is to be a jumper.  You can get money!  You can meet girls!  You can surf!  And you can eat your lunch on the top of the Sphinx! The special effects aren’t bad, but certainly nothing to get all that excited about.  Even the perennially cool Samuel L. Jackson was totally wasted as a villain who wasn’t even remotely scary or fun to watch.   Though I have to admit, I’ll never get tired of looking at Rachel Bilson…

As for Hayden Christensen, I was never one of those people who complained about him in the Star Wars prequels, and I stand by my assertion that he was just fine as Anakin, and completely consistent with Mark Hamill’s portrayal of Luke.  Some of the lines were clunky, but that wasn’t his fault.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the same people who ragged on him in the prequels ripped him for Jumper, but in both cases any complaints should go to the script writers  more than to Hayden.

And as a side note, I recently watched Shattered Glass, the indie film that Christensen was in, that people were raving about, and I enjoyed it, but I do not get how people can say he was terrible in Star Wars and amazing in Shattered Glass.  Both characters were people who were loved and trusted, but had a darker side underneath.  And Hayden did a fine job at both.  I’m not saying he’s the world’s greatest actor, but I just don’t get why he gets so much crap.  When the writing is good, he’s good, and when it’s not, he’s not.  Maybe a truly superb actor could make anything good, but I have to think that if Laurence Olivier was cast as the star of Jumper, it still would’ve sucked.