The Online Reflector

By Emmanuel Casillas, Staff Writer

Just what the heck happened? I won’t deny Doug Liman has directed some awesome movies. Just watch the essences of cool that are “Swingers,” “Go” and especially “The Bourne Identity.”

Liman hit a bit of a slump with the bloated “Mr. And Mrs. Smith,” but I don’t think anyone thought it’d get this bad. Working from a script by David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, from a novel by Steven Gould, Liman and friends whip up one heck of a mess, “Jumper,” in all its inane, horrid glory.

Hayden Christensen (who defined wooden for the ages in the “Star Wars” prequels) is David Rice, a teenager in a broken home family in Ann Arbor, Mich., who one day finds he has the ability to jump (that is, teleport) anywhere he wants, including his own town. This prompts him to go Nightcrawler and disappear to New York, robbing banks and anything else he can get his hands on, leaving I.O.U.s every time. This also gives us a chance to see Christensen do nothing much but pose, as he jumps to the face of Big Ben in London or has lunch on a pyramid in Egypt. He’s got it made.

Enter Samuel L. Jackson (does he ever turn anything down?), all done up in gray hair, as the leader of an organization that hunts down people like Christensen and kills them. It’s apparently a fanaticism thing.

Then there’s Rachael Bilson (always deserving of something better) as his childhood sweetheart, Jamie Bell as a fellow jumper who may or may not want to help him and then Diane Lane (who already hit a career low in “Untraceable”) as his mom who took off when he was five; she looks incredibly bored in her cameos.

Got that? It doesn’t really matter, since the movie is nothing more than throwaway action claptrap. There’s no reason to care how any of them fit into the equation. Liman doesn’t so much bother to direct. He just swings his camera around, making some attempt to sweep us up in the scenery and locales Christensen jumps to. Not happening.

Look, it’s still the first two months of the year, and studios have little, if anything substantial to offer us.

It’s a dead zone out there. What other explanation can there be for “Hannah Monatana/Miley Cyrus” whatever it’s called making tons of money?

There is a solution though, an alternative to sitting through this dreck. Go get reacquainted with the films up for Oscars, many are still in theatres and on DVD. There’s just no trusting anything being released lately. Try for the knockout films like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.” Jump anywhere else that isn’t this turd.

See “Jumper” if you must, but be warned, the acting is void, the editing is on auto-pilot, the script is a mess and the action scenes play out like you’re watching a trailer. There’s not a whole lot more I can say.

There are only so many ways you can say a movie sucks. You just know things are going bad for a movie when you’re screaming inside your head: “Please, God, make it stop!”

Seeing “Jumper” would be a huge mistake.