"Jumper" - movie review (and Indy IV trailer)

I didn't know anything about "Jumper" until I saw the trailer for it, and it had looked fairly interesting, being about people - known as "jumpers" - who could basically teleport themselves anywhere they wanted. I was curious to see where'd they go with the premise.

Overall, I thought the film was ok. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great and not necessarily something I'd particularly recommend. I found the story to be mostly gimmicky. I had hoped that they would use the teleporting ability in a more interesting way, but to me, it seemed like they were just using it for its "how cool" value. They had a number of different scenes in random different cities all over the world, as if to further illustrate the point of what the people could do, but I could have done without the travelogue. OK, yeah, I got it, they can go anywhere, can they do anything else more interesting?

Other than the jumpers' abilities, there was also the second major story point of the paladins, who chase after the jumpers to try to stop and kill them, so it's a never ending war between the two. There were some spiffy effects and ok story points but nothing really grabbed me. The story is based on a novel, so since I haven't read the novel, I don't know if the story problems come from the source material itself or in the adaptation.

I did really hate the narration at the beginning, which is how they explain the jumper's ability and how it started and such. I thought it would have been much more interesting to *show* the story rather than just *telling* the story. To me, the narration was lazy and unimaginative. For those who hate the narration in the beginning of the first version of "Blade Runner" (I prefer it without it, but I don't mind it myself since I don't think it's redundant but rather just adds more), I hated the narration at the beginning of this movie more.

Samuel L. Jackson was excellent as the head of the paladins. Hayden Christensen was uneven - good in parts and very unconvincing in others. The stand-out performance comes from Jamie Bell (He's probably best known for having the lead role in "Billy Elliott".) as a fellow jumper. And I really don't get the 2 minutes of screen time for Diane Lane. OK, I get where she fits into the story, but it just seemed like there should have been more, probably because of the casting choice. If it had been a lesser actress, I might not have expected the character to do more.



One of the things that I was excited about even before the movie started was one of the trailers that was shown - for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones saga, to be released on May 22, 2008. When the Paramount logo came up, it could have been any film, but when the Lucasfilm Ltd. logo followed, it could only be Indy. And the trailer didn't disappoint. They recapped Indy's adventures in the first three movies and then had footage from the new movie. Yeah, Harrison Ford is a lot older, but from the lines they showed, they've at least worked that into the film, and he still looks great. Shia LeBeouf looked awesome, and I can't wait to see what they do with Karen Allen.

Here's the official Indiana Jones website.

I love these two pictures from the site.







I'm so happy Marion is back.


Here's a link to the trailer on Yahoo Movies and here's a link to the trailer on the official site.

I can't wait to find out if they're really in THAT warehouse. Damn, avoiding spoilers for this movie is going to be so frickin' hard. Anyone else coming with us to the midnight screening?