movie review--jumper

One could have a lot of fun, I think, comparing the movie 'Jumper' to the last two 'Star Wars' movie.

Hayden Cristiansen (I'm spelling his name wrong, aren't I?) as a young man with extraordiny powers, family issues, a girlfriend in trouble, and having to deal with a super-secret organization.
Samuel L. Jackson as an older, hard, dedicated man set to make things right.

The guy with the British accent who tries to set HC's (I'm not going to misspell his last name again, though I'm even certain of those initials (could it be HK?)) character right.

The problematic mother figure.

Maybe a few others. It's not like the similarities are all that strong (at least HK's father isn't a bunch of microbes, though in some ways when we first meet him he's not much superior, at least that is the impression from the brief time he's on-camera early in the movie). And unlike Mace, Jackson's character here has hair.

And I'm still looking for the Yoda-character. Sorry, none come to mind.

It's not a great movie, but it's not bad, either. I'm not sure I understood the whole jumping thing very well, it wasn't completely like Nightcrawler in the X-Men movie, it seemed to involve motion and the opening of something like a wormhole.Or maybe that's the byproduct of watching too much Stargate SG-1 lately.

I've heard HK get a bad rap for his performance in this movie, and I wonder why. His character is perhaps more low-keyed then may be expected in such a movie, but I was fine with it. One thing he did that I didn't appreciate until later was that his character didn't remind me much of Anakin Skywalker, he played them both differently.

If anything, maybe his performance was too real-to-life in some ways. Perhaps it needed to be more comic-book-like, more over-the-top. He doesn't panic or hyperventilate or go into rages. he doesn't even really seem to hate the man hunting him down.

The movie is not without its bad stuff, I fear. Although not shown much, the relationship between the jumper and the girlfriend does get physical, and he is shown with another girl in bed at one point. He's also essentially a thief, using is jumping ability to break into banks and steal from them. He and the sidekick are seen going quite recklessly through a city in a stolen car.

We are given two separate groups in the movie (outside of normal people), the jumpers, and the super-secret organzation made up of people called paladins who hunt down and kill jumpers.

Apparently it's been going on for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Jackson's character is a sort of unhinged religious fanatics who says that jumpers should be killed because they have powers only God should have (not that his position is given any sort of support biblically or from any other religion).

It's not a bad movie, but there's little in it to blow the viewer away, either.