|
|
To begin with the confessions, I should state that thus far I have not felt motivated to complete my watching of "Jumper", which leaves this review a little unfair. Furthermore - and pretty much in the same vein - I am not a typical member of this film's target audience!
To such an outsider, Doug Liman's 2008 piece is intriguing as an example of the genre. It starts off hugely attractively - it's slick, fast, worthwhile, nicely filmed, with clear motivation. A story smoothly and elegantly told and all is well.
We take a first knock when it becomes clear that the older David Rice is living his playboy lifestyle by stealing, but - what the heck - many a crime-thriller/comedy has played with this level of immorality before, whether it be the "The Lavender Hill Mob", the "Italian Job" or "Now Your See Me".
At around the same point in the film we get a little teaser which tells us quite a lot within the film plot, but also maybe about the piece itself. Our hero sees a TV news report to the effect that nobody would be able to reach people threatened with death by flooding in time. It then becomes clear he is looking for an umbrella and a mac but ... he goes nowhere near the flood and instead heads for London for a clubbing and one-night stand experience. Hayden Christensen's handsome young smoothie is not fundamentally evil, even if he robs banks and ignores the plight of people he could save, and he did have a difficult childhood, which he at times uses as a mask... and at this stage the immorality is still only at the level of poor-taste joke cashing in on the British capital's infamous weather. And perhaps this naughty joke is even a worthwhile one, since it makes it definitively clear that our "jumper" is NOT any kind of selfless superhero. If the makers are satirising the character or wanting us to hate him, well OK; but that is by no means clear from the context of the film, which does seem to be lionising David, even at second glance.
Hence, it's still in dubious taste, somehow. Presumably those flood victims are indeed victims, by the time he's hopping into bed with his conquest of the evening, but it's not weighing heavily - or at all - on David Rice's conscience, and do the makers REALLY condemn this attitude?
After that, we are very rapidly "jumped" to a tropical forest scene in which, pretty much without warning and seemingly out of context, a white-haired Samuel L. Jackson as "Roland" - let's say a representative of the fully "adult" world, as opposed to David's still-juvenile pleasure world - is murderously plunging a knife into the belly of a trussed-up young man, making gloating and nasty remarks.
At this point, we have left comedy and charm (and genuinely young as opposed to young-adult viewers) behind in a way that prevents them from ever really returning, no matter how hard the film tries. For try it apparently does, seeking to bat on with more rom-com stuff, no matter how disturbingly hopeless that cause may now seem - at least to an adult audience-member.
Thus a similar circumstance ensues as the longed-for romantic encounter between David and his attractively grown-up childhood sweetheart Millie (played by Rachel Bilson) finally takes place, ultimately in that loveliest and most cultured of cities, Rome. Unfortunately, the would-be love scenes at the Colosseum are ruined - again irrevocably - by a fight breaking out between our "jumper" and what later emerge are the long-time enemies of his kind. This fight involves both death and destruction - to an extent that again renders any attempt to rescue comedy or romance from the ruins impossible - at least from the point of view of a watcher of my age.
This is intriguing, as the above description would apply equally well to any James Bond film, and yet... Bond manages to fuse the different emotions, while "Jumper" just seems cruel, sneering, cynical and amoral. The deaths and violence here are just too throwaway, and somehow a line of decency and taste is irrevocably crossed.
As someone who works with young adults on a daily basis, I do note an increasing difficulty with such people not knowing "where to draw the line". The only remaining question would be: do films like "Jumper" encourage such moral ambiguity, or do they just reflect what is already happening out there in the people they aim at?
score 5/10
jrarichards 4 May 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3700279/ |
|
29-11-2019 04:43:21
