The basic plot of Doug Liman's alternately dry and ridiculous new action thriller Jumper, and the film takes great pains to NOT introduce anything that might distract from that one paltry premise: One really uninteresting guy can teleport wherever he wants (including bank vaults, beaches, and the head of the Egyptian Sphinx) -- up until the day that a ferocious (but also ridiculous) villain shows up to ruin all the teleport-y fun. And then we get a half-decent chase, a bunch of hyper-kinetically edited action, and a sequel teaser. For a 90-minute flick that focuses on a guy who moves real quick, it sure doesn't move all that slick. It’s impossible for outsiders to know who deserves most of the blame for this dud — its director, Doug Liman, its three screenwriters, its multiple producers or the various studio executives who might have done far too much meddling or not nearly enough. Whatever the case, “Jumper” — a barely coherent genre mishmash about a guy who transports himself across the globe at will — is of interest only because it revisits a theme that Mr. Liman has explored in films like “The Bourne Identity” and, if reports about his troubled productions are true, speaks to his own reputation as an escape artist: the character who wiggles out of trouble.
The trouble here starts when a likable high-school loser, David Rice (Max Thieriot), discovers that he can do an end run around the space-time continuum, teleporting from here to there faster than Dorothy can click her sparkling red shoes. Before long he’s zipping from Detroit to Tokyo (and into bank vaults) and has transformed into a materialist slacker (now played by a somnolent Hayden Christensen) whose rooms are filled with goodies and walls are papered with images of his fave jump spots. One minute he’s cruising a blond sylph in London; the next, he’s hanging with the Sphinx in Egypt. It’s all good, except that it’s all bad, from the subliterate dialogue to the chaotic direction and heavily edited points in between.
Then, you know, something happens. In this case, the something is mostly Samuel L. Jackson, who, as a mysterioso avenger, arrives barking his lines and wearing the latest addition to what has become a notorious collection of extreme hairpieces and looks. Snow white and close cropped, Mr. Jackson’s hair in this film dominates its every scene (it’s louder than the predictably voluble actor), rising out of the visual and narrative clutter like a beacon. It glows. It shouts. It entertains. (It earns its keep.) It also suggests that someone here has a sense of humor, as does the casting of the persuasively thuggish Michael Rooker (“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) and the woefully misused Diane Lane as David’s estranged parents.
Luckily for Ms. Lane, her character doesn’t get much screen time, largely because she appears to be on hand only to help humanize David, to counterbalance the brutal father with the sentimentalized mother. She’s as disposable as the pretty bland thing (Rachel Bilson) who tags along with David for a while and has been written into the screenplay for all the reasons female characters are usually written into male coming-of-age stories, namely she looks good in her underwear and establishes the hero’s heterosexuality. Ms. Bilson fills out her bra nicely, but is nowhere as seductive as Jamie Bell, who, as a British jumper called Griffin, gives the film a jolt of energy along with a heartbeat. When he jumps, so does the film.
