Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Sleek and spare

“Once I was normal ... a chump just like you,” young David Rice (Hayden Christensen) informs us in the opening scenes of the new sci-fi thriller, “Jumper.”

But now, David lives a life most of us can’t even imagine — noshing on croissants in Paris in the morning, surfing waves off the Maldives at noon, sipping coffee atop Mount Kilimanjaro in the afternoon and watching a glorious sunset from the pockmarked pate of the Sphinx.

David is a “jumper” — a genetic anomaly who can instantly teleport anywhere on the planet by leaping through ... well, just how and what he leaps through is never fully explained, though a vague mention of “wormholes” is dropped along the way.

That’s just one of many nuances that don’t get fleshed out by writers David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg. In adapting Steven Gould’s novel, the trio proves anew the Inverse Ratio of Hollywood Scriptwriting: A film’s “huh?” factor soars exponentially whenever the number of credited scribes rises above two.

This despite a rushed running time of barely 90 minutes. I’m always griping about films being too long, but “Jumper” is the rare flick that could use another 15 minutes of meat on its bones. Why sign up Diane Lane and then give her only 75 seconds on screen? That’s barely a cameo; it’s more like a fly-by.

With a bare-bones plot and thinly drawn characters, this becomes one of the many films released these days that stands or falls almost entirely on its visual effects. Good thing those effects are very cool eye candy.

When we first meet David, he’s a shy, socially awkward 15-year-old living with his grouchy, blue-collar dad (Henry Rooker). He can barely recall the mother (Lane) who split when he was 5.

One day, he falls through the ice of a frozen river. On the verge of drowning, he suddenly “wills” himself out of the water — and lands gasping, soaked to the bone, in his local public library, of all places.

As he tests his newfound power, he soon realizes he can teleport into bank vaults loaded with cash. It’s only a small leap from there to ditching his father and setting himself up with a life of globetrotting luxury.

Luxurious, but lonely. Eight years later, he goes home to look up his high-school crush (Rachel Bilson of “The O.C.”). Telling her he’s “in banking,” he whisks her off for a dream trip to Rome. But after sneaking her into the Colosseum after hours, David’s world collapses in on him.

First, he learns he’s not alone when he runs into another jumper, the sardonic Griffin (Jamie Bell). That’s quickly followed by a heavy-handed attack from Taser-wielding thugs whom Griffin calls “Paladins.”

They are led by Roland (Samuel L. Jackson in full B-movie cheese mode, with long cloak and snow-white hair), who at first says he’s with the National Security Agency. Later, he says he’s with the CIA, then the IRS.

His real identity and purpose, and the reason for the deadly animosity between jumpers and Paladins, forms what little heft there is to the inch-deep story, so I’ll refrain from offering any more of the scant details.

Director Doug Liman, who honed his hyperkinetic style on “The Bourne Identity,” creates some of the same energy here. In one standout scene, Griffin jumps into a Mercedes showroom in Tokyo and jumps out at the wheel of a sleek, high-powered sedan.

“If it moves, I can jump it,” he grins (don’t bother asking; there is no answer), before taking David on a high-speed “jumping” lark through the thick city traffic.

So, there you have it: clean, sleek camera work, head-rush effects and an undernourished but inherently gripping premise. (Come on, who wouldn’t love to have this power?)

For fans of the sci-fi/comic book/pulp fantasy realms — yeah, I’m talking to you, geek boy; it takes one to know one — that mix should be juuuust enough to put “Jumper” over the top.

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Rated PG-13 for mild violence, language and brief sexuality. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.

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