Theater Report: Jumper

February 17, 2008
SM City Cebu Cinema 3
5:30 PM
Attendance: 90% of capacity

Previews: Teaser trailer of “Star Trek” (directed by JJ Abrams). I first heard about this new Star Trek movie a year or two ago in Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). Mix reaction in the forum when it was announced. Some said it’s going to be a disaster. Some are more optimistic because it was going to be directed by JJ Abrams who created TV’s “Lost” and “Alias”. Funny because when I watched “Cloverfield” two weeks ago I thought it was the movie tied to JJ Abrams that I heard in HSX. And I thought it wasn’t very impressive for somebody who created “Alias” and “Lost”. Now I realized it was “Star Trek”. Impressive.

Story: This report is about “Jumper”, but I just spent a relatively long paragraph about “Star Trek”, which will not be shown until 2009, probably Memorial Day weekend 2009. Anyhow, “Jumper” is a story of at first one and then later on two “jumpers”. They are people with the ability to teleport to any place they can vividly see in their mind (places they’d been to before, seen in postcards, etc.). It wasn’t long since finding out about his ability that the first jumper used it to steal money from a bank. He said he had no choice. He was 12 and alone. “What would you do?” Oh, I don’t know. There are many decent jobs that I could think of if I’m a jumper. Delivery boy, messenger, spy, to name a few. Now those are just “jumping” related jobs. There are other regular odd jobs minus the hours spent traveling to and from work. But then again all of them combined wouldn’t earn half as much as a minute stroll to the friendly neighborhood bank’s vault. Anyhow, all is well, until somebody who kills jumpers for a living showed up.

My thoughts: The first 30 minutes where the film’s premise was fleshed out were great. From there up to the ending wasn’t so great, or good for that matter. It became nonsense. Carrying around a backpack full of money is so 70’s. How about buying himself tons of debit cards? With few spare bills for those where debit cards aren’t accepted. And what is that secret society that hunts down and kill “jumpers” because “only God should have that power to be everywhere at the same time”? What’s that society all about? “Only God should decide when somebody should die,” I’d say to them if I were the jumper. It’s probably just anti-religion symbolism nonsense. It could just have been a love story between a jumper and an ordinary girl. Or a superhero story. As it was, it was nothing but about a pursuit of a jumper. Once the pursuer was defeated, the movie ended. It had to. It had nowhere else to go. Hayden Christinsen doesn’t show much emotion on screen. The actor who played his character as a “young jumper” would probably had done better at the job had he been years older.

Would I see it again? No. Would I recommend it to my friends? No. I wanted to buy the book where this movie was based on, but it wasn’t available in Powerbooks SM Cebu and I didn’t have time to go to National Bookstore. The book’s probably better than the movie.