JUMPER
Hey all. Capone in Chicago here.

If I learned any lessons from this hipster superhero movie JUMPER, it's that discovering that you have the ability to teleport apparently turns you into a raging douchebag. If the story itself sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's essentially just a boiled-down version of an original tale ripped out of an X-Men comic book. A kid's power manifests itself in his teen years, and he spends his life either stealing what he needs to survive or avoiding those who see him as a genetic abomination and want him dead. Hayden Christensen plays the anomaly David Rice, who has a near-death experience in high school (Max Thieriot plays David as a teenager) that triggers his teleportation power. While his schoolmates all think he's dead, David takes advantage of his newfound gift to pop in and out of bank vaults and take as much cash as he can. OK, so he doesn't exactly do any hero-ing. What he does instead is make himself very rich and a great seducer of women. He hops around the world picking up ladies, while all the while pining over his childhood crush, Millie (who grows up to be Rachel Bilson).

One of the many things that doesn't quite make sense in the plot of JUMPER is that David decides the best time to finally reunite with Millie mere minutes after an attempt on his life is made by Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), a man clearly intent on tracking him down to kill him. So what better way to lay low than go visit an old flame and woo her with a trip to Rome, where he is attacked once again. During a conflict in the Coliseum, Rice meets another "jumper" named Griffin (KING KONG's Jaime Bell), who's an even bigger douchebag than him. Griffin's one redeeming quality is that his sole mission in life is to kill "paladins" (those would be the folks that want to kill jumper; at this point, I might join their ranks).

Christensen and Bell spend the whole movie dancing around each other seeing who can be the biggest dick, and there is absolutely nothing compelling about either one of them. JUMPER isn't so much a movie as it is a sketch of one, and a rough one at that. When David sneaks Millie into the catacombs of the Coliseum after hours, the most she can muster is, "This is amazing." People, once and for all: the word "amazing" has been rendered meaningless by unoriginal writers. Not. Everything. Is. Amazing. The thing that truly surprised me was how weak the direction is here, and it occurred to me that I'm not convinced Doug Liman is a good director. When he's given a good script (SWINGERS; GO; THE BOURNE IDENTITYS), he seems capable; when he's given subpar, he doesn't elevate the material. The Jumper script is co-written by David Goyer (DARK CITY; BATMAN BEGINS; the BLADE trilogy), who is normally a reliable scribe, but something went horribly wrong here. Either the source material novel by Steven Gould is crap, or Goyer just wasn't inspired by it.

I've heard this is actually the first part of a trilogy; the ending certainly sets up another film involving David and his estranged mother (a blah extended cameo by Diane Lane). If so, I'm hoping things improve greatly in the next two parts. They need to, because you have to try real hard to make Samuel L. Jackson boring in a villain role. I wasn't just disappointed by JUMPER; I actively and fervently disliked it.

Capone
I also love watching 3 naked women rub on Harry