From the Archives: Jumper

A dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives finds the last wide-release Hayden Christensen movie just days after the now neglected actor celebrated his 37^th birthday.

Doug Liman, the director of The Bourne Identity, tries to reinvigorate the fantasy genre by bringing his trademark edgy handheld camera style to bear on new blockbuster Jumper but fails miserably. Jumper’s main problem is a wretched script that is the work of three screenwriters as well as the original novelist Stephen Gould. This film is transparently meant to establish an Origin Myth for an action franchise but it rushes through its set-up with unseemly haste. You will long for more detail on the mythic past of the teleporting Jumpers and their mortal enemies the Paladins but you will neither get that nor a good reason to care about any of these characters. This is all the odder given that the screenwriters boast Fight Club, Batman Begins and Mr & Mrs Smith on their collective resumes. Jumper thus bears the dreaded hallmarks of extensive studio meddling during its protracted post-production.

A brief prologue shows our hero David Rice discovering his power to teleport after a school bully’s prank leaves him fatally trapped under the ice in a fast flowing river. He then uses this new found ability to escape his abusive father and relocate to NYC where he robs a bank and lives off the proceeds for the next 8 years. In Hayden Christensen’s first scene as the grown up David he walks past a TV news report about people stuck on rooftops in a flood which asks how can these people be saved when no one can reach them? ‘Well, a Jumper could reach them…’ you mutter…but David just heads to the fridge for a beer before flitting off for a night on the town in London. David is selfish to a fault and Christensen’s utterly flat performance doesn’t make him any more sympathetic. Jumper slows to a crawl when he revisits Ann Arbor to whisk off his high-school sweetheart Millie (The OC’s Rachel Bilson) for a Roman holiday. Exactly why she agrees to go should become one of cinema’s most enduring mysteries. In Rome David meets Jamie Bell’s Griffin, a Jumper dedicated to killing the Paladins who have hunted the super-powered mutant Jumpers for centuries, and reluctantly teams up with him to defeat Roland, leader of the quasi-religious Paladins.

Jumper’s teleportation heavy action sequences involving ‘blink and you miss it’ globe-trotting underwhelm for the most part, with the exception of some extremely dangerous teleportation enhanced fast driving, and Jamie Bell’s line “God, I hate Chechnya” when the Jumpers unexpectedly land in a warzone. Samuel L Jackson as Roland, the vicious Jumper-hunter, has some fun sporting a fetching white hair-do but his role, rather like the film, is too underwritten for him to really make an impact. Ultimately (and ironically) for a film about people who never walk when they can teleport Jumper ends up a sadly pedestrian affair.

2/5

Ender’s Game

Wolverine director Gavin Hood redeems himself substantially with this sci-fi effort, but Ender’s Game, despite its celebrated source novel, is still some way from being a film that you simply must rush out to see.

Ender (Asa Butterfield) is a twelve year old at space academy who shows such promise that Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) cuts him from the programme; to provoke a violent attack by a bully. Ender returns home to his empathetic sister (Abigail Breslin) and psychotic brother. However, his vicious response to bullying was what Graff hoped to see and Ender is dispatched to Battle-School to hone his potential to become the next Julius Caesar. There he quickly falls foul of his older classmates because of his superior intelligence. After clashing with his classmates, and commanding officer Bonzo (Moises Arias), Ender is given his own war game team. With new lieutenant Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) by his side he succeeds so well that he is promoted to the fleet’s command school bordering the planet of the Formics. The Formics were defeated decades before only by the sacrifice of legendary hero Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley). But now their military capabilities have become threatening again…

This is a far slicker outing by writer/director Gavin Hood than his 2009 Wolverine muddle. The CGI work is unusually good, being very crisp looking so that the zero gravity war games are totally convincing. The script, however, is problematic. Far too many major characters are deeply unpleasant. There’s brutally abusive bullies at every level of education, an unhinged brother at home, and the voluble approval of ultraviolent tactics by Graff every step of the way. Hugo star Asa Butterfield’s blue eyes are as fetishised as Daniel Craig’s in Layer Cake, but there’s precious little emotion behind those deadened irises. Ender is a hero that it’s very hard to truly care about. True Grit’s Steinfeld is totally wasted (the script doesn’t ever bother introducing a structural romance with Ender), while Ford and Breslin are mere ciphers. Perhaps it’s not coincidence that the finale recalls The Matrix Reloaded in its subversion of action finales, as anything that recalls Reloaded is doomed.

But then Ender’s Game is a veritable echo chamber of influences. Mazer Rackham defeats the arthropod Formics with Independence Day’s finale. Except Orson Scott Card’s source novel predates it… And so it goes. Deja vu, all over again. How much influence did Card have on that other tale of adults forcing children to be violent, The Hunger Games? But then how much influence did Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers have on Card? Did Card influence Verhoeven’s subversive film of Heinlein’s bug-hunting? I spent far too much time trying to puzzle through the politics of the historical analogies employed by the film. The constant valorisation of ultra-violence as a strategy by Ender is quite troubling, and, I thought very Alexandrian, except that after therefore comparing the factions to Greeks and Persians throughout they turned out to be more Romans and Carthaginians. All of which is probably far too complex anyway given that Harrison Ford actually says Napoleon “conquered the known world.” Ahem…

The high concept of Ender’s Game; teenage children commanding an entire star-fleet while successful adult generals stand aside; never succeeds in making much sense, but despite a worryingly nasty streak it’s a solid movie.

3/5